Complacency Corroded Our System
We all know the twin peril and beauty of mother nature is that she makes life stronger by facilitating the death of weaker life. Grade school teaches us a watered-down lesson of Darwinism’s slow and subtle evolutionary impact over time. We indulge in the quaint narrative that evolution is the story of one small abnormality in a single moth that helps its progeny prosper and that proud abnormality becomes a new normal over time. Mother Nature is not always so peaceful or patient.
In her endeavor to give life strength, Mother Nature wipes out entire ecological systems with a single storm. Lightning strikes turn ancient forests to ash. A virus brings society to its knees.
The glimmer of hope unearthed by COVID-19 is that many debates about governance and society have been definitively answered: Our system is weak. The hidden kindness of this virus’ human tragedy is that Mother Nature has laid our weakness bare.
Complacency corroded our system. Mother Nature just proved it to us. Mother Nature is giving voice to a long ignored dark truth of our collective unconscious: At some point, we stopped preparing for winter. We have known this. Intuitively as a species we will always sense when we’ve indulged in summer at the cost of safety in winter. Winter is here, and she’s brought consequence.
Abandoning the allegory, our government stopped being proactive. We all know this. Governance devolved into a reality-TV staged argument that focuses on ratings while maintaining the status quo. We indulged in hot takes while society became reliant on a status quo held together by duct tape. All the while, consequence kept creeping up on us.
There have been a few consequences of reactive government failure in my lifetime. 9/11 happened when I was a freshman in high school, last I checked we’re still spending blood and treasure in wars far from home as well as trading tax dollars and freedom in favor of domestic security and spying. The Great Recession happened as I graduated college, not many people my age will ever reach the level of economic security we should have if the economy hadn’t imploded at the outset of our careers. The forever compounding interest of student loans is an exponential erosion of the economic security of millions. Climate change is here. But no consequence has been so great or so clear or so condensed as the Coronavirus. After killing hundreds of thousands and damaging the health and psyche of billions, COVID will plunge us all into a depression of unknown depth and duration.
Perhaps now we will stop tweaking at the margins? Perhaps now we’ll trade in the hot-takes for serious leadership? There is a joke about public perception: the only thing worse than the way things are, is change. COVID proves that there are things far worse than change. It is time to proactively govern. It is time to prepare for future winters, now.
What will we do about it? What will you do about it? When our children and grandchildren wake up one morning to find Mother Nature at their door, will we have built a system strong enough to protect them from suffering, or did we just dump all the consequences of our indulgence in their laps? When Mother Nature comes again, and our children turn to us, will we look our loved ones in the eye and say we’re ready, or will we point at the TV and offer a hot-take about how they failed? Let’s get ready.