Food for Thought

Quarantine Journal: Part 1
Early on March 31, in the darkness and silence shortly after midnight, I gazed through a window into the past. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Allow me to explain.
In 1984 (the year that my parents and I moved to Ralls County), the world population was around 4.7 billion. Last year, the global human population was around 7.7 billion, representing an increase of over 60% in the number of us worldwide.
In 1984, Highway 61 had only two lanes south of New London (there were A LOT more two-lane highways back then!), and the federal speed-limit was 55mph. As a result, we all traveled less. A fifteen-mile trip to Hannibal was a treat. A longer trip to Quincy? A holiday. The world was a much larger, emptier and slower-moving place than it is today. In many ways, this made us a lot safer from pandemics than we are now. For instance, if there was a flu outbreak in Quincy in 1984, the virus might still take a while to get to New London. If New Londoners weren’t as likely to be traveling to Quincy, the flu wasn’t traveling very much, either.
All of this reminds me of Einstein, and how he proved that space and time were relative.
In 2020, a trip to Hannibal for my family is (or was) routine. In 1984, a trip to Hannibal was a treat. In 1854, however, a trip from what is now my family farm to Hannibal would have been a hard day’s journey by horse-drawn wagon. As the speed of communication and transportation have increased through the years, the distances between us have shrunk, allowing me to make many round-trips to Hannibal, while ancestors of mine, traveling from the same spot, might have made only one one-way trip. The world has become a roar of noise as we race past one another in our cars and as jets crisscross the skies overhead. Until now…
The Covid-19 virus has caused our world to grind to a halt…as I found on March 31, when I stepped onto my porch and heard…nothing at all…