A long time ago, and a very long time after, historians told us the disease started as a tiny outbreak in a remote farming community. A farming community in a far-off place called Kansas. A place where tornadoes swept in without warning, strong enough to carry a house over the rainbow, and land it in a magical world.
The community’s doctor treated the stricken with the strongest medications he had—antitoxins, against diphtheria, maybe tetanus— confounded by a disease which looked like influenza, but killed faster than plague. A disease which targeted the young, the healthy, the hope for the future.
The disease might have stayed in that far-flung farming community chained by isolation and weather, but for a more powerful pestilence. Flagrant and fulminant and indiscriminately destructive.
War.
Virulent enough to infect with patriotic fervor, overwhelm patriotic dissent, redraw our boundaries, redefine our limits, and sweep other news to the sidebars.
We saw the shadow descending. We scurried for cover. We cowered, constrained by a wall of ignorance.
The shadow, when it landed, crushed us all.