Ring Around the Rosie/ The Bubonic Plague

I didn't really expect that we would ever talk about the plague in this class, but I completely understand why it correlates with the third section of the semester.  The really funny part to me is that I actually have experience with a "plague" and I never really thought about the contradiction of it.

In my European History class in 10th grade, we spent a lot of time (about a week) talking about the Bubonic Plague and its origins/ the effects it had on human populations and smaller animals.  And we actually spent an entire day analyzing "Ring Around the Rosie".

But the plague actually didn't have any real significance in my life until I was 17.

I'm from Westminster, Colorado and literally right across from my street is a huge open space that covers the distance to the mountains less than a dozen miles away.  On the drive home, going south on Simms Street, there were dozens of little orange signs, which no one paid any attention to.  The following day, though, there were  giant signs that said "Beware: Bubonic Plague".

 It was probably one of the most random, most entertaining things that my friends and I had ever seen, and we genuinely though that is was just some huge joke.  But, it turned out that the signs were serious-- there was a plague occurring literally forty feet from my neighborhood and we were never affected.  Some random strain of Bubonic Plague had been transmitted to the prairie dogs in the area to the west and south of my neighborhood.

 The weirdest part is that, although we were no longer allowed to enter these areas, the plague could not hurt us.  In some ways, I think that this was actually an apocalypse, but not in the "traditional" sense.  It was just kind of an end to the way of life that we knew.  Leaving my neighborhood each day, I was used to seeing prairie dogs running into the street and turning their heads to look at the middle schoolers waiting at the bus stop.  But then, randomly, it stopped happening.  The signs stayed up for around six weeks, and during that time, I don't remember seeing even one prairie dog.  And then, randomly, they just disappeared and we never heard anything about the "end" of the plague...  

For the twelve years that I lived in my neighborhood before college, people would always complain about the prairie dogs and the holes that covered the trails in our open space.  For five or six years, there was this huge motion to wipe them out completely because it would be "beneficial".  Yet, the second that the signs went up, people were so worried about these little animal terrors.  It was a huge shift for our community because everyone started to realize that the little nightmare pests were just as much a part of our world as any of us were.  

In class last Wednesday, we talked about the idea of realized eschatology and how it is the end, but only in a symbolic manner.  I feel like, in my little bubble in Westminster, Colorado, we kind of went through this transformation.  This huge shift happened, where everyone stopped badmouthing prairie dogs day-in and day-out, but no one even knew that it happened.  It literally just took four years to make that realization myself.  But an end did come, because there haven't been any bills proposed in my area since that time, to exterminate the population of hundreds of thousands of prairie dogs.  

But, its literally still one of the funniest things, who would ever expect to see a sign about the Bubonic Plague in the suburbs of Denver? Because I surely didn't!