Have you noticed?

It hit me this morning over my coffee, that I wasn’t being inundated with COVID news. Anthony Fauci hasn’t been doing the chat TV interview circuit.

I guess all we needed was a war, rising gas prices, and the threat of inflation to break the fear mongering of the national media. Or did these things simply cure COVID?

Even CNN’s front web page has only 1 covid related item. Since I haven’t watched CNN in over a year, I’d bet there’s still the crawler at the bottom of the screen giving COVID statistics.

To be sure, COVID is not gone. It’s still out there doing what viruses do. It’s mutating. There are other variants appearing and at this point those variants appears to be following the normal viral lifecycle. Greater infectiousness, lower fatality.

Gee, all it took was the threat of a nuclear war and upcoming midterm elections to stop COVID doom in the United States.

Humans! What a species.

I call this better, because like most people I was sick and tired of the “DOOM ON YOU” messaging of the media about COVID.

“COVID is gonna kill you,” To which I said, “Okay, but when? I wished it would just get on with it.”

Now I find myself thinking along the lines I used to think about during the Cold War.

Several media outlets have spoken about a nuclear exchange and again, I’m like, “Fine. Whatever!”

This is perhaps a fatalistic view but with Nukes, at least it’s likely to be quick. I live within 10 miles of a military base.

I suppose I’ve grown tired of the constant doom. We’re all going to die sometime. I’d prefer to just go about my day without being reminded of it every 10 minutes. Which is why I don’t watch the news, I’ll read about the latest threat to all life of the planet in my own time.

If you’d really like to get your panties in a bunch, Look up gamma ray bursts. Somewhere in the universe a long time ago, a star collapsed or blew up. As its core ceased to exist, the star emitted an intense focused burst of gamma rays. Those gamma rays are at this moment blazing across the universe at the speed of light. We can’t see them because the universe is too big for us to have instruments trained on the entire sky.

A gamma extinction event could come at any time from any direction. It’s only luck that it hasn’t happened yet. But the day is still young! Why don’t we have constant interviews from pundits and wags telling us how to build shelters, or suicide booths?

Here’s why, Gamma rays tend to blast through anything and unless they’re absorbed by immense distance, or something with sufficient mass between their point of origin and us. A Gamma burst could sterilize the entire planet. Everything burns.

There’s a complete sense of powerlessness. It’s too big, too beyond our petty concerns. It’s unthinkable, instead we maintain our beliefs that we are special, and some deity will protect us. We can’t begin to process the enormity of something like this, the unfairness, the annihilation of our “special” species, and so we ignore it.

Our own sun could do us with an intense solar flare at any moment. That, our scientists would see coming and we’d have 30 minutes or so to say goodbye.

The sky changes color, the Aurora Borealis is, for a brief instant visible across the entire planet as the high energy particles interact with the shield created by the magnetic field of our planet. There are pretty colors and the sentient population of the planet stands in amazement. Then the shield is overwhelmed and poof! Everything burns.

The next day, the sun still rises and Earth spins on.

A million years later, some weird bacteria rises up from some protected cavern in the deepest part of what used to be an ocean, or falls to Earth aboard an icy comet and life starts again.

There is nothing we can do about it, just as we couldn’t stop a pandemic. Pandemics happen almost like clockwork. So do extinction events.

Mars, had all the elements for life. Until a huge asteroid smacked the planet. Some scientists think that the impact disrupted that planet’s core enough to cause the magnetic shielding to fail permanently. Then it was just a matter of time, the solar wind carrying off the atmosphere atom by atom, just so much dust in the wind so to speak. Solar radiation increased and well, the results are obvious. A cold, dry, desolate, dead world.

Another couple million years and the remaining atmosphere of Mars will be gone. 5 or 6 billion years later, our sun expands and the inner solar system is recycled. Who knows, a hundred billion years later, maybe all those atoms will coalesce forming a new planetary system. Then again, maybe not. It’s the luck of the draw.

Because in the back of my mind I try to see the whole of creation, (Not just Earth, but the universe,) I guess I have a slightly different view. It’s tough to maintain that view with all the constant noise from daily events. But my view gives me comfort.

It also tends to make me willing to discard things that I cannot control. I prefer instead to focus on what I can speak of, or directly change, or control.

I couldn’t prevent the COVID pandemic, but I could speak facts and try to remind people that it wasn’t a complete death sentence. Measles decimated the native people of Hawaii. Smallpox decimated the native peoples of North America. The Black Plague killed 1/4 of Europe. The 1914 influenza and subsequent waves killed 50 million people.

And the world spun on. Humanity continued. There are no guarantees. Dance in the light while you can, don’t worry about a guaranteed tomorrow. Live now, in this time and place and make the best of it.

We can prevent a nuclear war. We can choose to live in peace with each other. We can choose to be kind. We can choose not to be petty, or hateful, we can step into each new day as a gift, fearless of what may happen and joyful in choosing to live, love, learn, and become our best selves.

I guess, I believe that the echos of us reverberate throughout the universe. The infinitesimally small transmissions of electrical activity in our brains scatter out in all directions across space and time. Perhaps, those transmissions spark inspiration, or recognition of beauty, or a moment of kindness in an unimaginable species 100 billion years from now. Or, a moment of cruelty, destruction, or harm.

My choice is to stumble toward the light, to be better than I was yesterday. I choose to believe that a decent act, a kind act, or my dancing in the sunlight in joy, will at some point stay the hand of a tyrant on a distant world, or cause a child to smile seeing beauty in something commonplace.

That’s my immortality.

Even if that doesn’t actually work across billions of years. It may make a difference here, now.

Oh I’ll still rail against things that bug me. I’m human and our focus is so easily narrowed to things that annoy. I forgive myself for that.

I just have to remember to reach for being a citizen of the Universe instead of just the Earth.

Look up at the night sky, be awed at the majesty and beauty.

Be at peace with yourself and others. Create and experience all the joy you can.

The choice is yours.