Could it Happen Today?

 Time was a central topic in our discussion on Thursday, and is crucial to evolution. Change takes time. Not only is the passage of time important, but so is the point in time and place. An organism may have a mutation that would make it extremely successful in a cold environment, but if that area has a tropical climate at that point in time, this mutation won’t have an advantage. Timing is also crucial in literature, and it made me think about whether the story told in The Plague would actually be able to occur in modern day America. Let’s put it in the context of not only modern day America, but Bryn Mawr. A quarantine did actually occur on Bryn Mawr’s campus in 1918 because of the Spanish Flu. This “Great Influenza Pandemic” killed 20-40 million people around the world. More people died of this disease in one year than in four years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague in the 1300s (http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/). Despite the quarantine, a fourth of the students at Bryn Mawr got influenza, but all of them recovered (http://www.brynmawr.edu/125 th/ timeline.html). In contrast to the early 1900s, which is when both this quarantine and The Plague take place, would a quarantine be able to happen on this campus now? With our strong sense of individual rights, would it be constitutional to force people to stay on campus or receive vaccines? Would students abide by the college’s rules of staying on campus, especially since we do not have gates surrounding our campus. How would we choose to spend our time? Would we go about business as usual, attending classes on campus until the flu was deemed as “over”? What about Haverford students that were forced to stay on campus? As someone that wouldn’t be in their own home, surrounded by their hall mates and closest friends, would they try to get back to Haverford or abide by the quarantine? They would be put in a Rambert-like situation. It might be easy for he/she to get back to Haverford, but would he/she stay for the greater good? I guess this post leaves a lot more questions then solutions, but it is just interesting to think about how distant this story-line is, but temporally and geographically, yet it is something a lot of us said we could connect to. Despite these connections, could we really see ourselves in a situation like this and would we act similarly to the characters in the story?