Thanksgiving 2020. Gratitude In The Face Of Hardship.
By Lonce Lamonte - November 26, 2020
When I read in the L.A. Times about all the L.A. restaurants having to close down even their outdoor dining now at this time, it makes me hurt. I feel these restaurants’ and their workers’ struggle for survival. I know the reality that some or more than some won’t make it for the long haul. I feel their pain.
We are in the middle of a pandemic and it’s a little eerie to be aware that the first Thanksgiving of 1621 was a celebration of survival even more intense that the survival that we are now facing in California and as a nation and a world.
In New England in the immediate years leading up to 1621, a pandemic disease called leptospirosis had wiped out the Patuxet community. Leptospirosis is a disease that is caught from exposure to rat urine tainted with the bacterium. These rats came over on the ships from Europe. And just like now when we are facing infection and death from a virus, the persons who engaged in the first Thanksgiving had to cope with massive loss while showing and expressing gratitude for their survival.
More communities of Native Americans than just the Patuxet died close to or absolutely to extinction from diseases to which they had no immunity.
The LA Times published a telling article about the first Thanksgiving just days ago.
Today, so many workers have been switched to home based offices, where so many will continue to work from home for many years to come. Our telecommunications world has revolutionized us and changed how we work forever. This coronavirus pushed it even further forward.
Work-related accidents can now happen at home, and challenges on how to investigate these accidents with home and work premises now so enmeshed are challenging investigations to new methods. AOE-COE (arising out of the employment, in the course of employment) situations are now happening in physical locations where they didn’t happen in the past.
Plagues have happened throughout history. There was the 6th Century plague of Justinian. This plague happened in the Byzantine region of the fading Roman Empire. The 13th Century plague of Europe, the worst of which occurred between 1347 and 1353, killed half of Europe. In 1346 there were approximately 150 million Europeans, but by 1353 there were about 75 million. That means one out of two people died over a seven year period. That’s pretty grim. That’s a stark 50%.
In the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, 2% to 3% of the world’s population died. In the U.S. in April of 2020, about 6% of persons infected with coronavirus died. That’s pretty grim and scary, too, but compared with the plague or Black Death of 1347 in Europe, it’s far less lethal. Of course it’s bad, but it’s good to know we as the human race have seen worse.
There’s then the huge problem of pandemics returning, and in altered form. For fifty years after the 1347-1353 plague of the Middle Ages in Europe, it returned to Florence, Italy on 14 separate occasions. None were as serious as the one that hit Florence hard in 1348, but these recurrences made it impossible for population levels to recover significantly.
By 1427, 80 years later, the population of Florence was 37% of what it had been in 1347. By the end of the 15th Century, there were strict quarantine rules. These quarantine rules were very much like the ones we have today.
In England, by 1351, England was pretty much mercifully almost plague-free. But it kept coming back every 6 to 10 years. Over 15 recurrences happened in England from 1351 to 1485. That’s 134 years!
Thus, to get to my intended point: this coronavirus could go away, and then come back in ten years. And that return could happen again and again and again and again… It could come back in a slightly altered form each time. And vaccines will have to be invented and reinvented again and again.
Our lives have been changed, for now, and forever. There's no going back in a year or two.
So, what do we have to be grateful for? That we’ve alive. That we’re surviving. That’s there’s hope for a vaccine very soon. That we can socially distance with technology and work from home arrangements.
We have weapons the Middle Ages didn’t have.
Happy Thanksgiving.
lonce@adjustercom.com; Lonce Lamonte, journalist, all rights reserved, adjustercom and Lonce Lamonte
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