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.
(note to reader—I invite you to subscribe to this series/blog. It will ensure you get these updates in a timely fashion. The purpose of my posting in this series is the purpose of my enterprise at Historical Solutions and, frankly, my purpose on earth in addition to my family—to explore the past in a creative way that brings new and different value to you, both in the present (this minute) and on the edge of the future (what’s ahead or forward of this minute). The past is everything before now, the totality of all time before the present; history is a set of very small slices of the past that, for a particular reason, have been remembered. If you wish to contact me privately, please do not hesitate to text or call 317-407-3687)
