[After the last song, the rest of the stage lights are turned off. The auditorium is dark. Only a single candle remains.

Four people take turns picking it up, telling a piece of a story and setting it back down.]

I. A Bottomless Pit of Suffering [Speaker: Nelson Lugo]

2016 was a very challenging year. For a lot of complex reasons, that I still don’t have a very good handle on. But right now I want to talk about something very concrete.

In a couple hours, you will go home, and you’ll walk past a person. Lying on the sidewalk, wrapped in whatever blankets they can find. Alone. They won’t ask you for money, because they’re past that point. They’re just trying to make it through the night.

You might not see them, because human brains train themselves to ignore things that seem unimportant, or uncomfortable, or beyond the scope of things you can do something about.

If you do see them… maybe you’ll stop and try to help somehow. Maybe you’ll just meet their eyes as warmly as you can. Maybe you just keep walking.

Whichever choice you make, by the time you get home, you’ll have walked past at least one more person in the exact same situation.

And the thought might occur to you – that it’s 2016. And we haven’t even beaten winter in it’s most basic, elemental form. It might seem like there’s a bottomless pit of unfairness, filled with desperate people and broken systems and that no matter how long you work, how hard you try, that pit will always be there.

And you might even be right. Because there is no long moral arc of the universe bending towards justice. There are just people. Doing the best they can. And sometimes their best isn’t good enough.

This is the secular solstice, and we don’t deal in comforting lies. But we do have story to share.

The story isn’t quite as clean or convenient as I’d like.

But it’s true.

–

II. Ali Maow Maalin [Speaker: Glen Raphael]

In 1977, Ali Maow Maalin became the last person to be infected with smallpox in the wild. He was a cook, working at a hospital in Somalia. He hadn’t gotten vaccinated because the needles looked painful and frightening.

On October 12th, an outbreak of smallpox was detected. A 6 year old girl was brought to the hospital. Ali Maow Maalin spent 15 minutes walking her to a car for quarantine. Two days later, that girl was dead.

In those 15 minutes, Ali Maalin was infected.

As his fever and rashes set in in the coming weeks, he didn’t report himself because he didn’t want to be locked away in isolation.

But eventually the disease became unmistakable. And the World Health Organization set to work containing the last smallpox outbreak. They identified 161 people that Ali had been in contact with, some living 120 kilometers from town. A total of 50,000 people were vaccinated in the months following his diagnosis.

And then, we waited.

A year past. A small outbreak at the laboratory, but it was quickly contained.

We waited.

And two years after Ali walked that girl to the car, we declared smallpox eradicated. Only a few samples of it were preserved in research laboratories in the US and Russia.

–

III. Something Possible [Speaker: Raymond Arnold]

When I first started researching this, preparing for tonight, I assumed that’s where the story ended.

But ten years later, a Russian scientist – the former head of the Soviet biological weapons program – came to the United States. He claimed that the Soviets had been stockpiling smallpox, planning to used it as a biological weapon. And that he had had a change of heart and dismantled the program.

We don’t know how trustworthy his account is. But there is a very plausible alternate history, where smallpox could have been unleashed again, and one of our species’ greatest achievements turned to ash.

And the most comforting thing I’m able to say about all that is…

…it didn’t happen that way.

We live in the branch of history where the cold-war subsided. Where the soviet biological weapons program was quietly dismantled. Where the World Health Organization developed protocols to respond to Smallpox should it ever be released in an attack.

This is not a story with a definite ending.

It’s not a story about something inevitable.

But it is a story about something that’s possible, when we get our shit together.

So if you are facing a challenge that feels insurmountable, and you’re looking around at 2016 and feeling like humanity is just worthless, and you feel alone.

Remember.

That there was once a pit of suffering 500 million bodies deep. There was once an invisible demon that ravaged our world, that crippled and killed for thousands of years. Unstoppably. Until one day we stopped it.

And at a time when the most powerful nations hated each other, when the world trembled in the shadow of nuclear annihilation… there were people working together. Doing their best.

Building systems flexible enough to be adopted in cultures across the world, from the largest city to the smallest village. Powerful enough to slay one of the deadliest adversaries we have ever encountered.

Smallpox killed 500 million people. But we live in a branch of history where it might never kill again.

–

IV. The Man Who Lived [Speaker: Miranda]

And Ali Maow Maalin?

He didn’t die.

He made a full recovery within a few months. And he spent much of the rest of his life helping to fight polio. He would go to parents who were afraid of strange people sticking needles in their children, and tell them “I was afraid. I almost died. But this thing you’re about to do is incredibly important.”

He said “Somalia was the last country to be declared smallpox free. I didn’t want it to be the last country declared polio free.”

In 2007, polio was gone from Somalia.

…

But in 2013, there was another outbreak of polio. And Ali Maow Maalin was one of thousands of volunteers working in Somalia, again. Delivering medicine and supplies. And while he was traveling, he was infected with malaria.

He died later that year.

In 2016, there have been 34 cases of polio. Total. And the world has moved, together, to fight malaria, and it has fallen 60% in the last decade. The work isn’t done and there are still organizations that need funding.

But I’d like us to share one more moment of silence – for Ali Maow Maalin. The man who lived. Who died fighting, to make his world safe.

[The last candle is extinguished]