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Daily Advice 11.18.2020
Nov. 18th, 2020 10:08 am More from Marcus Aurelius:
I've lost many people who were close to me. Most recently, my childhood best friend died of mysterious causes; he was only 36. I grew up in a region that was hit hard by the so-called "opioid crisis," an epidemic of needless death among the rural white population that includes as many deaths from alcohol and suicide as from drugs. "White Death" is a more accurate term for the phenomenon, though not much used now, presumably because it is no longer permitted in this country to show public sympathy for white people.
It isn't that we should accept injustice, including the policies of malign neglect and neoliberal economics which precipitated the devastation of rural America. These weren't caused by nature, but by men, and by men acting evilly. If we can do something about it, we should.
Hippocrates after curing many diseases himself fell sick and died. The Chaldaei foretold the deaths of many, and then fate caught them too. Alexander, and Pompeius, and Caius Caesar, after so often completely destroying whole cities, and in battle cutting to pieces many ten thousands of cavalry and infantry, themselves too at last departed from life. Heraclitus, after so many speculations on the conflagration of the universe, was filled with water internally and died smeared all over with mud. And lice destroyed Democritus; and other lice killed Socrates. What means all this? Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore: get out. If indeed to another life, there is no want of gods, not even there. But if to a state without sensation, thou wilt cease to be held by pains and pleasures, and to be a slave to the vessel, which is as much inferior as that which serves it is superior: for the one is intelligence and deity; the other is earth and corruption.
I've lost many people who were close to me. Most recently, my childhood best friend died of mysterious causes; he was only 36. I grew up in a region that was hit hard by the so-called "opioid crisis," an epidemic of needless death among the rural white population that includes as many deaths from alcohol and suicide as from drugs. "White Death" is a more accurate term for the phenomenon, though not much used now, presumably because it is no longer permitted in this country to show public sympathy for white people.
It isn't that we should accept injustice, including the policies of malign neglect and neoliberal economics which precipitated the devastation of rural America. These weren't caused by nature, but by men, and by men acting evilly. If we can do something about it, we should.
It is, however, the case that for those of us who have been subjected to times like these, it is our lot to have been so subjected. Whether it's White Death or the Coronavirus, we have been given the time we have been given, and the life we have been given. And we can allow hard times to teach us the truth known to every age before ours. As another wise man put it:
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
