Our fellow citizens were like everyone else in this regard—they thought about themselves, which is to say they were humanists, they didn’t believe in scourges. A scourge is not on a human scale, and so people say it isn’t real; it’s a bad dream that will pass. But it doesn’t always pass, and, from bad dream to bad dream, it’s the humans who pass, and the humanists first, because they didn’t heed the warnings.
