The Plague

Time and again our species has experienced the devastation of plague. The Black Plague of the mid 14th century killed perhaps a third of all Europeans in 4 years. Yet, very soon after the plague burned out Europeans experienced the flowering of the Renaissance, the great historic turn that launched our modern world. So the great achievements in Florence and other cities showed that people are resilient, and will thrive, even after a time when people believed that the world might be ending. The plague returned over and over again, with deadly effect - though not on the scale of 1347 to 1351 - until 1665. Yet people soldiered on and kept, as our politicos and news mavens say,"moving forward" with enough confidence to make our world. Let's hope we can do the same.