A Letter to The Man Who Said, “I Don’t Owe You Anything.”

For most of human history, the infant mortality rate hovered between 40 and 50 percent. Half of all children died before reaching late adolescence. The average lifespan held somewhere in the 40s. As a species, we were treading water. Outbreaks of disease happened on a regular basis. If it wasn’t the plague, it was typhoid fever. It was malaria. It was tuberculosis. It was smallpox. It was diphtheria. It was measles. It was cholera. In 1793, an outbreak of yellow fever killed 10 percent of Philadelphia’s entire population. They evacuated the city. Things like that happened often. Most Americans don’t understand the role that diseases have played in human history. Some of them even go around talking about how we’ve always “lived with” germs. No, we haven’t. Thomas Hobbes once described life before society as nasty, brutish, and short. I used to think everyone knew that line, but now I’m not so sure. There seem to be more and more people, especially Americans, who have no appreciation for how we got here. <a href="https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/a-letter-to-the-guy-who-said-i-dont-owe-you-anything-630106a617b9">Website</a>