Almost 100 years ago a great pandemic spread across the world. It was called the Spanish Flu, not because it originated there but because Spanish newspapers publicized it while papers in the United States and northern Europe censored it. We were at war and didn’t want the population to get upset.
As it was, the disease killed more people than the war did. It is estimated that 500 million people came down with the disease, and 50 to 100 million died. In the United States alone, 670,000 died. Life expectancy dropped 12 years per person.
Society began to disintegrate. In most disasters, people come together to help each other — we have seen this in recent hurricanes in our country. In 1918, people only looked out for themselves. The head of Emergency Aid in Philadelphia pleaded for volunteers to help the sick. Almost no one came. Children starved to death because their parents had died, and no one would risk giving the kids food. The fear of contagion was overpowering.
In many industries, only half of the workers would show up. A worker at an emergency hospital in Philadelphia encountered so few cars on the road he took to counting them. One night, driving the 12 miles home, he saw not a single car. The life of the city had almost stopped.
Who was left to help? In Philadelphia, it was the priests who drove horse-drawn carts through the streets to pick up the bodies. During times of plague, for two thousand years, committed Christians have been willing to sacrifice themselves and take care of the sick, the hungry, and even the dead.
Would you lay your life on the line for the sake of your community? It is at times like that that you discover if you really believe God’s promises are true.
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Adapted from “Journal of the Plague Year,” by John M. Barry, Smithsonian magazine, November 2017, page 34-43.