Sinner Man: Pandemic

December 12th, 2015
music, solstice
Last night I played for a secular solstice (slides, chords). It was patterned after the celebrations Ray Arnold has been organizing in New York, though on a smaller scale. We were in the MIT Chapel, and it was great singing with everyone. This is the piece I led.

Ninety-eight years ago the Spanish Flu started spreading rapidly across the world. We still don't know where it started, but we know what it did. Fifty million people dead, one person in twenty, ten times that many sick. These were young and healthy people, their lives cut short by a disease that didn't care. More than half of us have relatives, in our grandparents or great-grandparents generation, who died in the outbreak.

Ninety-eight years since, and we've been lucky. But as our knowledge of infectious diseases rises and the level of resources required to experiment with them falls, the danger gets higher. Past pandemics have been natural disasters, deadly through chance and bad luck. The pandemics I worry about are ones created intentionally. How to reduce this risk is still an open question.

So let us sing, about the day we must keep from ever coming.

Chorus:
O sinner man, where you gonna run to? (x3)
All on that day

Verses:

  1. Run to the Doctor, the Doctor is a-coughing (x3)
    All on that day

  2. Run to the law, the law it is a-failing (x3)
    All on that day

  3. Run to the woods, the woods they are a-burning (x3)
    All on that day

Referenced in: Boston Solstice 2018 Retrospective

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