With the coronavirus pandemic — sadly described as fluff by the “orange incompetent” — followed by our “moderate” earthquake of March 18 — my Tribune reading jolted by the back-and-forth rocking of my tenth-story condo — I am reminded of Voltaire’s revolutionary critical insight of the 1755 Lisbon 9.0 earthquake that killed thousands.
From Wikipedia: “Voltaire’s ‘Candide’ attacks the notion that all is for the best in this, 'the best of all possible worlds', a world closely supervised by a benevolent deity. The Lisbon disaster provided a counterexample.”
Natural disasters must serve as a wake-up call. Shocks we experience acutely, like COVID-19, or insidiously, like climate change, should make us grapple with the dangers surrounding us all. As we are mired in daily routine, frequently devoid of poisons of disaster, this wake-up call bespeaks reassessing what values are the values we should live by — the good and the bad — thus making us more able to achieve what is meaningful in a world of great beauty and mystery, but also a world that begets great suffering and death.
Richard H. Keller, Salt Lake City