This Lyme Disease plague is horrible. Here in New Hampshire, USA, it is pretty frightening to go for a walk. Woods, grasses, trees, flower gardens are all overflowing with ticks and the ticks are overwhelmingly bringing this illness. Going out in nature for a walk is dangerous. Patting your dog is dangerous. Planting your garden is dangerous.
Some people say that this is pay back for our treatment of the natural world. Some say that we created this problem with our biological warfare research gone haywire. Everyone I know has been effected by Lyme Disease.
When people wonder what caused the collapse of former empires like the Mayan Empire, they come up with huge theories. Could it be something as simple as a virus spread by a tick the size of the head of a pin?
I have never experienced nature as a danger. I have enjoyed the wildness of hurricanes, I have pictures of us going to church on an Easter Sunday in the fifties, wearing straw hats with snow from a blizzard piled over our heads on the front walk. I remember the Worcester, MA tornado cutting our city in half. I watched the Indonesian Tsunami on videos. After each natural disaster, we cleaned up and moved on. This ongoing disaster is a plague. You can't clean up.
Hopefully, some Jonas Salk is out there in his/her laboratory discovering a cure or a vaccine. When I was a child polio was our nightmare. In the hottest days of summer, the pools were all closed. Mummy wouldn't let us go in the pond. Even the ocean beaches frightened some. Our parents knew that water was one of the places where you got polio. But, the cause was unknown. Then, viola, we lined up at school and got polio shots and the problem started to be eliminated.
Many of my friends are against vaccines. Many of the vaccines are probably perilous, but it feels good to me that polio has been eradicated from the planet and the same for smallpox. We are on the brink of a crippling epidemic and I wish I could find the cure. Nothing is impossible.
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