Glass: Half Empty or Half Full?

 Covid 19 is on our minds continually. We dodge people and we wear masks and we find it hard to be positive about the future. I often have nightmares about the physical process of the medical treatments and of course the prospects of death at my young age. Nothing can change the reality or the facts – though we do argue about the facts.

That’s were philosophy comes in. It’s the old glass half-full or half-empty story. There’s the glass – which way is it? We are challenged to decide how we are going to live with this threat.

So I decided to follow an approach that focuses on what others have dealt with. If they could get through those histories, then I suppose we can deal with our own.

Please don’t fault me for the choices I made below. They are meant to be illustrative. But they are also real and meant to remind us that others have had to find ways to cope with some pretty horrible things. They somehow had to find ways to live despite incredible uncertainty. Maybe our situation isn’t as different a we think?

I encourage you to write me or make comments about things I have left out.  

I cut and pasted this information below mostly from Wikipedia. I am not a historian and cannot vouch for any of the numbers. While not each and every item listed below had the same significance and incidence, each is an example of something that affected many directly and many more indirectly. Living through these events without knowing how they would turn out must have been terifying.

• The Blitz was a German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom in 1940 and 1941,... From 7 September 1940, London was bombed by the Luftwaffe for 56 of the following 57 days and nights.
• From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe. The first camps were established in March 1933 immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
• By 1995, complications from AIDS was the leading cause of death for adults 25 to 44 years old. About 50,000 Americans died of AIDS-related causes. African-Americans made up 49 percent of AIDS-related deaths.
• The Black Death (also known as the Pestilence, the Great Mortality, or the Plague) was the deadliest pandemic recorded in human history. The Black Death resulted in the deaths of up to 75–200 million people in Eurasia and North Africa, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351.
• By far the most costly war in terms of human life was World War II (1939–45), in which the total number of fatalities, including battle deaths and civilians of all countries, is estimated to have been 56.4 million, assuming 26.6 million Soviet fatalities and 7.8 million Chinese civilians were killed.
• For 110 years, the numbers stood as gospel: 618,222 men died in the Civil War, 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South — by far the greatest toll of any war in American history.
• In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., lists more than 58,300 names of members of the U.S. armed forces who were killed or went missing in action. Among other countries that fought for South Vietnam, South Korea had more than 4,000 dead, Thailand about 350, Australia more than 500, and New Zealand some three dozen.
• There were so many things going on around 1918 that it’s difficult to say which one was the most horrifying. What’s not mentioned in the same tone, however, is the Spanish Flu, even if it was by far the most devastating event among everything happening around the time – at least in terms of death count. At its peak, it infected around one-third of the entire human population, and total casualties are somewhere in the ballpark of 20 million to 50 million.
• I doubt the accuracy of this data I found, but it quotes numbers of slaves in the US. In 1790 there were estimated to be 694,000 slaves in America. In 1860 the number had risen to about 4 million. Slavery was not legally abolished until the 13^th amendment in 1865, December 6^th ratified. Racism remains an obstacle to the lives of millions in America and elsewhere.

I end on that point.