Not Gonna Happen

Last week's issue of Time magazine revolved around the message "Finding Hope".

In it, Mikhail Gorbachev says: "The response to this new challenge cannot be purely national................decisions will have to be made by the entire world community."

"The overriding goal must be human security - providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for peoples' health".

After this pandemic is dealt with, he is calling on world leaders "to convene an emergency special session of the U.N. General Assembly...............it should be about nothing less than revising the entire global agenda".

Laura Spinney has a column titled "Rethinking Our Food System".  She talks about disease causing microbes that jump from animals to humans. This is called spillover.

Spillover declined in the last century but has been increasing again in recent decades. "There is growing evidence that it is largely about the way we produce our food - in particular the ways in which modern farming forces humans, animals and microbes together."

"If the world's experience with Covid-19 has a silver lining it could be that it galvanizes us to take seriously our role in manufacturing our own diseases".

Last Friday Bill Maher did a piece about how everybody is up in arms about "wet markets" in China, widely considered to be the source of Covid-19. He contrasted that with how we treat the animals that are our food sources. The inhumane way we treat them, the way we crowd them into insufficient pens, the things we pump into them, the way we starve or overfeed them.

He made the point, and rightfully so, that we are not much better than wet markets, if at all.

The Dalai Lama says: "In this time of great fear it is important that we think of the long term challenges-and possibilities-of the entire globe."

"this pandemic serves as a warning that only by coming together with a coordinated, global response will we meet the unprecedented magnitude of the challenges we face".

Never gonna happen. None of it.

Brian Williams recently said on MSNBC that Americans do not generally learn from our mistakes. I will take that a step further and say that humans do not generally learn from our mistakes.

No matter what harms or threatens us or fucks up our lives we remain petty, unthinking and selfish.

Numero Uno, baby and fuck everybody else.

Don't get me wrong. I want all that good stuff to happen. I want it so bad I can taste it. I just don't believe anything will change.

If human beings learned there would only have been one World War. We become more petty, unthinking and selfish the further down the road we get. Which is insane when you consider the technology we have at our fingertips to make things better.

Once we survive this pandemic the world should change. Drastically. All countries should work together to improve the lives of every human. Equitably. If countries put aside political and national interests and pooled their resources the results would be mind blowing.

We have the capability to do this. We do not have the will.

I will not hold my breath. And it saddens me to say that.