Stonefish
Reef Stonefish
“Thou know’st the first time we smell the air we wawl and cry.”
–King Lear
Shakespeare was right, of course. We come head-first into the world and, drawing our first breath in it, seem to intuit life’s pre-eminent lesson: we are entitled to precisely nothing — not food, not water, not toilet paper, and certainly not surgical masks and ventilators. And so it is that in our first few moments in the arena we give a great angry cry in protest — until someone sticks a tit in our mouths.
Which is a thing that doesn’t seem to change no matter how old we get.
The great success of western civilization in creating and sustaining comforts and freedoms has led us, perhaps, to believe we are entitled to them by virtue of some great beneficent dispensation of the cosmos. But we aren’t, and never have been, and as this pandemic flares and rages around the planet, taking lives and livelihoods with it, many are relearning – or discovering for the first time — the fundamental fragility of that assumption.
The pandemic-inspired awareness that we aren’t actually entitled to a damn thing — and that’s the only thing being “woke” can actually mean without irony — clashes fiercely with what we’ve been teaching generations of young people: that we are entitled to health and happiness, and if we just eat smoothies and talk nicer and recycle plastics we might even live forever.
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