Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Per wiki:
The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic: In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Lees caught the virus and was very close to death. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women—in some areas, they had up to a 70 percent death rate. While his wife was convalescing, he wrote "The Second Coming".
Yes, because you knew a real pandemic was all around you. Same with smallpox and polio back in the day. Not this "trust us, it's real" bullshit.
I recently saw a sob article that cried: "The number of Americans who died of Covid is now the same as the number of people who died of Spanish Flu (suprised they haven't forced a renaming of that yet.) Well, perhaps, but there are also now 4-5 times as many people in the United States as there were 100 years ago.
50 million people total (at least) died of the Spanish Flu… Worldwide, that is.
I doubt Covid ever reaches that. Even if we’re just considering “with Covid” deaths… 😑