The World Cannot Be Fixed With The Same Thinking That Broke It
By Adbusters.com
April 29, 2020
It struck as if from on high, like a bolt of lightning.
After striking an insulating material such as lawn or earth or flesh,
lightning often leaves behind scorch-marks in branch-like patterns,
which trace its path through the stricken material as the latter
undergoes electric breakdown.
Likewise, as the coronavirus contagion has surged through its
human medium, it has left behind a pattern of destruction laying
bare the structural failings of the world as we knew it before
the shock of the pandemic.
The scale of the crisis is historic.
Last Friday, President Trump signed into law a plan for the relief
of the American economy: a stimulus package totalling $2.2 trillion,
the largest relief package in the country’s history.
For comparison, the package wrought under President Obama
in 2009, to alleviate the toll of the Great Recession, came to
a mere $831 billion.
And yet the provision of urgently needed medical supplies, such as
masks and test-kits and ventilators, remains woefully — mortally —
beyond the United States’ reach.
It is a country mighty enough to summon two trillion dollars to
stave off the demise of its economy (and, owing to its central
predominance, that of the rest of the globe), but unwilling to
do much of anything to save the lives of its citizens.
This is a matter not just of the current president’s especial
callousness, nor of his unfortunate intellectual shortcomings.
It is a symptom of the country’s diseased moral makeup,
at least as manifested among the powerful.
No more hospital beds will be procured until they prove able to
turn a profit; no factories will be converted to the manufacture
of ventilators unless doing so becomes gainful.
In times of crisis, only warfare has provoked the political will
necessary to override the supremacy of American wealth, thereby
harnessing the economy to serve the immediate interests of
the nation, rather than solely its elite.
If the imminent deaths of tens of thousands of are not enough
to motivate the same today, then there is little else that will.
To leave the burden of choice — to earn, or to aid — up to the
charity of private individuals is grossly negligent, if not criminal.
It remains to be seen just how charitable they will prove to be.
Meanwhile, as nearly every nation on Earth wrestles with the
costs of the pandemic (which doubtless will endure in the form
of enormous debts, not to mention the loss of many lives and
even more livelihoods), other existential dangers loom.
In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the
Doomsday Clock closer to midnight — one hundred seconds
away — than at any time since its establishment in 1947.
Today’s nuclear powers are plunging headlong into not just
a renewal but an acceleration of the Cold War’s race towards
annihilation.
Furthermore, though the worsening of the climate crisis has been
temporarily allayed by the virus’ precipitating a plummet in fossil
-fuel consumption, it will resume with a vengeance once everyone
— that is, everyone who still has a job — returns to work.
Whether the coronavirus can soon be controlled, larger disasters
await.
As this perilous situation has thrown into stark relief, “business
as usual” is sorely inadequate to the solving of threats the likes
of which all of humanity must face as one.
Indeed, this state of affairs has not only abetted the pandemic;
it lay at the very root of it.
Densely intermeshed, global supply chains, transporting goods
and people all across the surface of the Earth, ensured that any
novel and highly contagious disease, once introduced into this
network, would rapidly become widespread without improbably
proactive intervention on the part of the world’s leadership.
What is more, the post-2008 financial paradigm left the global
economy critically vulnerable to further and greater
destabilization.
Meantime, the strained political mood, both within and between
the world’s most powerful states, inspires little confidence in the
prospect of a worldwide united front in the face of worldwide
problems.
Morale is in short supply, while fear risks metastasizing into a
pandemic of its own.
The cracks are showing, and yesterday’s approach can only fail
to stop their spread.
The world cannot be fixed with the same thinking that broke it.
The rotten nature of the financialized global economy must
be addressed.
The vital necessity of healthcare, for all of society, must be
recognized.
The unchecked political and economic orthodoxies that brought
humanity to such a state of peril must be overturned.
All habits and assumptions must be reconsidered.
Sweeping, systemic change must go viral; all else points to
darkness.
https://www.adbusters.org/articles-coded/change-must-go-viral
