A speech I gave at a recent Toastmasters meeting.
Isn’t it funny how a tiny little thing has, well, rendered us all helpless?
A little viral particle — 125 nanometers wide — has boarded us up into our homes. Playgrounds, once teeming with children, sit empty, the swings swaying alone in the wind. Shoppers scurry like mice in and out of supermarkets. Once in their cars, we sigh with relief and rip cotton masks off our faces. Our hands swell with red, itchy welts from repeated applications of hand sanitizer.
This little particle — Covid 19 — has turned our lives upside down. Businesses have declared bankruptcy. Citizens have lost homes or been evicted by landlords. Millions of people are now unemployed, joining long lines of tired, bedraggled neighbours lining up for food to feed their families. Airports, normally bustling with travellers, are cavernous. Voices echo inside.
125 nanometers. That is all.
That is all it took to render 2020 for many, a complete disaster.
A very tiny particle with enormous impact.
But how big is 125 nanometers? Indeed, how big is a nanometer?
I looked it up.
Imagine a centimetre. We use this all the time. About 2 ½ of them fit into an inch.
Now, a nanometre.
1 million of these fit into a centimetre. One Million. The SARS corona virus measures 125 of these teeny tiny nanometres.
This astonishingly tiny thing has killed over a million people and sickened millions more.
The power of infinitesimally small things to cause great destruction.
Tonight I’d like to talk about big versus small, tiny versus gigantic.
Normally our society worships big things.
50 storey skyscrapers that dominate a skyline.
A rock concert packed with tens of thousands of screaming fans.
Mega highways surging with traffic.
The energy of a big city, pushing beyond its borders, sending its roads and suburban sprawl far from its centre.
We admire billionaires and their bank accounts. We salivate over stories of celebrities with extreme levels of excess, dripping with jewelry, being chauffeured around in luxurious limousines, occupying palatial homes.
Yet, with Covid 19, a tiny virus, just 125 nanometers wide, has threatened all these huge, enormous things.
One cough from an infected person can sicken, and in fact kill thousands of people, and they sicken and kill tens of thousands of others.
The moral of this story could be: don’t always believe in big things — in huge bank accounts, in enormous shows of wealth.
Because the big can be so easily defeated by the small.
But here’s the good news.
In the past several weeks, some infinitesimally tiny warriors have shown up.
I’m talking about the potential vaccines announced by Pfizer and Moderna, with 90 and 94 per cent effectiveness.
These, too rely on the tiniest of particles — RNA particles, to be exact.
Now not everyone here may have confidence about vaccines, and I hear that. More testing needs to be done, and the rollout must be cautious and careful.
But the one thing that potentially could render this tiny, yet deadly enemy helpless is something just as microscopic itself.
It’s a war between two foes each a few nanometers long.
If it wasn’t so dire a subject, I’d try to be funny and call it
The Nanometer Battle!
But it goes to show us — that our worship of all things huge, outsized and expensive — our celebration of giant bank accounts and amazing achievements — pales in comparison to an infinitesimally tiny war.
A war, however, that has a huge impact.
A contest that hopefully, hopefully — will be over in the months to come.
