Opinion: Pandemic may show us who we are

History doesn’t repeat itself, someone once said, but it often rhymes.

There have been plenty of comparisons lately between our modern-day predicament and the Spanish flu of 1918-1920, and for good reason. If we can learn from that historic pandemic, maybe we can avoid making some of the same mistakes.

Of course, the circumstances are very different now — and that’s to our advantage.

In 1918, a killer influenza virus hit in the middle of World War I, a terrible conflict that raged between 1914 and 1918 and killed an estimated 17.5 million people.

The Spanish flu killed a lot more people than that. It infected about a third of the world’s population and, by at least one estimate, killed 50 million people worldwide. In the U.S. alone, it killed more than 10 times the number of American soldiers who died in World War I.

David Brooks, a columnist with the New York Times who also provides analysis for the PBS News Hour, wrote a piece about a month ago that generated some worthy discussion. Headlined, “Pandemics kill compassion, too,” with the haunting subhead, “You may not like who you’re about to become,” Brooks pointed to the darker side of plagues and pandemics and what humans will do in an attempt to survive them.

He quotes a Philadelphia emergency aid director who pleaded for help in taking care of infected children during the flu outbreak, and got virtually no response: “Nothing seems to rouse them now,” he said particularly about the women whose hearts had previously gone out to the children. “There are families in which every member is ill, in which the children are actually starving because there is no one to give them food. The death rate is so high, and they still hold back.”

Brooks said that “explains one of the puzzling features of the 1918 pandemic. When it was over, people didn’t talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to the flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I, and yet it left almost no conscious cultural mark.

“Perhaps it’s because people didn’t like who they had become,” Brooks said.

Could such cruelty happen now? Maybe. We’ll see how we respond to outbreaks of COVID-19 in our overcrowded prisons; will we go to extraordinary lengths to mitigate prison infections or will we just let the virus decimate those vulnerable populations? If we turn our backs on them, it will speak volumes about our own lack of compassion.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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