We're about to witness the best humans have to offer

Posted by collectivist


"What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.”— Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
I remember driving into the office in 2008, looking around at the big box stores, fast food restaurants, and strip malls that were along my commute back then, and knowing that they were all about to go away, that a horrific dislocation was starting. It wasn’t a belief; I knew it. I had done the math at that point. As the financial system melted down, I remember thinking that the comfortable world as we experienced it was all about to end. It was utterly depressing.
Of course, I was wrong. The world didn’t end – not even close – and my daughters who were four and one that fall are teenagers today, having grown up in a time more prosperous than I could ever have imagined. Still, I remember that feeling in 2008. It was a helpless form of resignation.
You might anticipate that I’m going to tell you I’m feeling the same today, but I’m not. It’s not that this isn’t scary – if you’re not at least a little fearful today, you probably don’t have a deep enough grasp of the situation. The unlikely-yet-statistically-inevitable global pandemic I wrote about in early February has materialized.
Statistically, while the odds of any single virus resulting in pandemic is small, a future viral pandemic of global scale is almost a certainty. Your odds of escaping it are not good (doubt that: read about the remote and practically isolated Inuit during the 1918 pandemic), but they can be dramatically reduced by supporting things like a free press in authoritarian countries, strong world health organizations, a spirit of open and collaborative scientific inquiry (not distorted by partisan politics), and aggressive steps by international bodies during early stages of potential outbreaks.
The virus has now definitely arrived in the United States, a country that has never dealt with the underlying financial problems that brought about the 2008 crisis. Yes, we’ve had a statistical “recovery” but it’s hard to defend it as anything more than papering over the problem, printing money and running deficits as a way to avoid the difficult challenge of fixing the broken underlying model. . ."

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-03-16/were-about-to-witness-the-best-humans-have-to-offer/

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