Out of two outlier countries comes early 21st century's history riding on the tails of dictatorial leaders' decision-making that transforms the world in hitherto-unimaginable ways. Who aside from the scientific community, could have lapsed even momentarily out of their comfort zone to think of a plague consuming the world body? And yet this is what happened when a coronavirus slipped from animal to humans, as another dread zoonotic that would take the toll of millions of human lives. 

Nature gone somewhat off course. Yet again, in the wake of other, historical plagues to focus humanity's collective mind on the vagaries of existence. And before the globe could see this pestilence receding, hard on its heels arrived another mass casualty of human-on-human relations defaulting to the forever-resuscitated condition of conflict.

Nature in her vast laboratory devised the unseen, silent dread of a virus whose sole purpose is to invade a living human body whose moist interior becomes the cradle of its countless offspring. A peculiarly offhanded method of ridding the world of humanity's excess baggage as the elderly fall away into the chasm of lonely death.

Nature, cruel in her indifference to all but the pleasure of creating new organisms and watching as they adapt, or fail to rescue themselves from the challenges of survival. Always, in some part of the world the sinister drama of evil stalking the land and reaping its victims, sharing them with a partner in desolation, the Angel of Death.

That is there. Here is peace and tranquility. Where in a civilized society far removed from the baggage of a long history of oppression and benighted discriminatory hatreds, people are permitted to get on with their lives as well as they can manage. Today,for us, dawned bright and beautiful. We only know of the deadly carnage wreaking havoc a world away when we pluck our daily newspapers up from the porch and unfold them over breakfast.

In our world, the sun is shining, eye-blindingly illuminating the thick, heavy snow that fell overnight. Whereas people in Kyiv have been blinded as the sky lights up from the explosions of artillery shells and bombs. There, people huddle fearfully in bomb shelters. Here, a warm and comfortable home shelters us from the winter cold, but the landscape is such that we make our plans to venture out-of-doors in anticipation of entering a forest,delightful recreated as a magical kingdom of snow-frosted beauty.