Learning From The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Day 8

Blinding speed. Bewildering speed. You just can’t even hope to understand the cosmic swiftness of this speed. Welcome to reality on the eighth day of influenza, September 15, 1918. Outbreaks are occurring across the world and throughout the US. Nearly all are related to war and war-making. Camp Lee in Virginia, Camp Dix in New Jersey, Camp Dodge in Iowa, and the port of Los Angeles where the illness arrives inside a shipload of soldiers entering the city. At Brest, France, 45,000 US soldiers are at duty as cases begin to appear (shown above) from infected French troops. The Navy Hospital in Philadelphia shuts its door to any new patients; in a matter of hours and a few days it is full with influenza victims. In New York City the first actual influenza-based death is reported. And something else seems to start on this day—those people who have displayed symptoms and entered hospitals begin to die quickly.

A thought for you on Day 8, March 20, 2020, eight days after President Trump declares Covid-19 a national emergency—you are now seeing a Truth that you will see in many forms in this series. The pandemic collides with the dominant or defining issue already on the scene. In this moment, it’s the World War. That collision is vastly important and its effects, its impact, will roll and roll and roll. We can imagine and predict some of these effects. For the rest of the effects—for the majority—they can only be experienced as they happen. Understand and absorb this Truth and gear yourself and your individual leadership to contributing to it positively and not negatively.

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