Small and Large

A virus is too small for unaided eyes to see. Yet, it is currently bringing down thousands of “centers-of-the-universe,” as surprised as Goliath at what a littl’n just did to him. At the same time, a teensy Coronid is aided and abetted by a lumbering Emperor of the Empire. When joined in equally mindless quests for self-perpetuation, Loud was and will be a next fall.

The effect of butterfly wings half-a-world away is revealed in exponentially larger results at our elbow. Our unconsidered wake returns the favor.

With a large enough population, yet unknown epigenome changes may have added resistance, for some, to a particular virus (“poison”). In such a way, the basic genome can continue. Hooray for wrestling at the microscopic level as well as in the heavenly realms. Both are beyond us and catch us middlers in conflicts, not of our making.

A usual approach to social conflict is to cast it in terms of power. Time after time, it is apparent that an appeal to a “better angel” is a lost cause. In such cases, small resistances of a meal-in-common and guerrilla actions are the only routes open. These are still available, even in the presence of quarantine rules about distancing and martial hyper-surveillance.

Sometimes we are the small, threatened by the large. Sometimes we are the large, threatened by the small. Finding ourselves caught between is ordinary life. Here we are—breathing and responding between an unexpected-and-unasked-for birth and an all-too-expected death masking its specific from-what and when.

May we use our everyday opportunities to navigate our responses of entitlement and humility wisely. It will be all too easy to falsely deploy each. Odds are it will take a community of mutual partners to assist one another. May we learn to honor such a dynamic and seemingly trivial engagement.