WHY VIRUSES?

Someone exhales and emits an invisible cloud of virus particles. A person standing by inhales those particles and two weeks later they are in the ICU, medically comatose, breathing with the aid of a ventilator, struggling to stay alive. What the hell!

What are viruses for and why do they keep using people to replicate, while also sickening and even killing the human host? And despite our super-scientific efforts to destroy them, they keep mutating to more resilient, resistant, and even deadly forms.

Enough is enough already.

We have pretty much locked down the basic story of evolution. From ultra-tiny one-cell creatures to multicellular eukaryotes (all other living beings) that carry on life processes—feeding, repairing structure, dividing itself and thereby reproducing; then onto organisms that separate genetically into male and female, that become motile on land, in water and in air, etc. etc. We don’t know if viruses are pieces of organisms that somehow split off and found a way to sustain themselves, or if they are degraded bacteria that found a way to survive sans reproduction, or if viruses are the oldest form of life and maintain themselves all through earth time, living and reproducing parasitically on such unwittingly eager hosts such as ourselves.

Viruses never progress toward higher forms of life. They are bits of RNA or DNA that must invade a host cell in order to replicate by seizing control of the host cell’s propensity for genetic re-coding, allowing viruses to multiply and invade other host cells like an army taking control of a city, occupying it, using its resources to restock, killing the citizenry and moving on to the next town.

Who needs the little bastards?

Are they part of the autonomous evolutionary process, the incipient life force that promulgated all living creatures, animal and vegetable, though all of earth’s living time? And the continue simply because the survive and get reproduced. Certainly that has been the common denominator experience of every species. Even extinct creatures persisted to reproduce until they were either killed off, as in the great asteroid strike 66 million years ago, or because their food supply has been cut off from competition with other creatures, or climate change has imperiled their survival, or diseases has wiped them out, or pollution has lethally poisoned them, and so on. But the pressure to reproduce is never lost until the species vanishes.

Do we entertain an evil QAnon-ymous conspiracy theory that some long-dwelling Dr. Strangelove character in an invisible ether has been attacking humans with an almost unconquerable enemy: viruses?

Or are viruses employed as evolution’s genocidal method for reducing population, a sort of balancing weapon, making lebensraum for the survivors.

Are not viruses, like war, always with us, generating fear and pushing science and technology into combat like a benign militia?

The current pandemic, unlike the last great pandemic of 1918, seems hell-bent on out maneuvering us. No sooner do we get one variant under control then the next one, ever more infectious, arrives to do us battle. It’s like a leak that keeps recurring, keeps us with our hands on the mop.

It’s gotten almost to the point where it is hard to inhale in the presence of another person without a little tremor of fear and loathing.