Remembering

IN THE SPRING of 1918, at Camp Funston, Kansas, several soldiers became ill. As spring progressed, and soldiers all over America moved and deployed during the final year of World War One, they spread the sickness, now recognized as the flu, to military bases all across the United States, and then to Europe, as two million Americans arrived on the continent to join the war. By 1919 nearly seven hundred thousand Americans were dead of the flu, due mainly to a lack of vaccinations in an ear when bacteria and viruses were only beginning to be accepted as reality. Millions of Europeans and anywhere from fifty to on hundred million people died in the great flu epidemic of 1918-1919. The governments of nations involved in the war, including the United States, deliberately withheld information about the pandemic from their civilian populations, wanting them focus on winning the war, undistracted. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson often gave speeches exhorting his people to hold firm and press on to victory, but he never, not once, mentioned the great epidemic which was killing many times more people than the war. The only country which provided its population with information about the virus was non combatant Spain. Thus the pandemic became known as the "Spanish flu", only for this reason. It should have been called the "American flu". The horrible disease kept reinfecting America and Europe in waves, three altogether, as the war sent hundreds of thousands of people back and forth across the Atlantic. By the time the second wave struck in the fall of 1918, people had abandoned social distancing, and had stopped listening to medical experts, whom they believed had failed them. In fact, social distancing during the first wave greatly mitigated the severity of teh epidemic, but nobody believed it. Once the flu finally abate, it was swept under the rug, as if the world wanted to forget all about it. Society, it seemed, much preferred the memory of the glorious victory in the war to the nightmarish memory of the flu. As H.L. Mencken said: people expunge the memories of nightmares, past and present. Otherwise intelligent people, disregarding medical experts. Religious fanatics screaming about God's vengeance upon a sinful culture. Governments, failing to inform and protect their people for political reasons. All hauntingly familiar. As George Santayana said: those who do not remember the lessons of history repeat their mistakes.