Political inaction is no longer an option
It was one of the many cogent observations, following
the 9/11 terrorist attack on the U.S. that the reverberations of the multiple
incidents and the nearly 3000 deaths would continue long after the grieving and
the anger. Not only were two wars incited by the attacks, travel restrictions
were introduced, a Homeland Security monster, and a transformation of how each
of us perceives and relates to the world.
It is this latter concept, the injection and embedding
of what now seems a permanent psychological, if not also physical, biological, cognitive
and even spiritual anxiety, that began in the early months and years of this 21st
century, and has been significantly exacerbated with the now year-long onset of
a global pandemic. In the middle of the first decade, there also fell from the
sky-scrapers on Wall Street, an economic downturn that can be traced to a resilient
reservoir of greed, credit derivatives, bankruptcies generating multiple
bail-outs.
Recently, public health figures have documented a
spike in depressions, suicides, marriage failures, job losses, business
closures, food shortages, and also remarkable stories of home schooling by
parents with neither the training nor the experience to accomplish this task. Individual
biographies of single mothers, struggling with part-time or no employment, home
schooling, food shortages, and a residue of both resentment and anxiety,
depression and even hopelessness can and will surprise no one who has been
paying attention to the daily narrative. Add to the list of immediate and pressing
needs, in nearly a half-million families, in the U.S. the deaths of a family member
from COVID-19, many, if not most, of those deaths preventable if the former
administration had not adopted a narcissistic, and highly cavalier attitude to
the exigencies of what could and should have been a national public health
program on steroids.
Commentary on the prevalence and the profundity of the
social and mental health earthquake in which the world is trying to cope, may
seem so redundant, if it were not for the facts that stare people who are
engaged in the face:
· That
COVAX, the international group allegedly purposed with providing vaccines to
underdeveloped countries and their people, when that program will meet only 20%
of the estimated need
· That
the wealthy nations seem to have joined a competitive race to acquire and then
distribute and inject millions of vaccinations into the arms of THEIR OWN
people, as quickly as possible, in order to address the urgency of the political
moment,
· That
the truth of the matter, without a global elimination of the virus, and its
continually growing number of variants, in every country, county, city, town,
village and hamlet on the planet (mission not a single one!) the rest of the
world will continue to be subject to surges of the pandemic, and the need for
additional, alternative and highly effective vaccines, as the mutations will
continue.
· That
the pharmaceutical companies, given a developed nations’ mind-set favouring the
capitalist model, have both been given and have taken the “upper hand” in when
and how they will develop their unique vaccines, the prescriptive modalities of
their administration, their storage, and their relative effectiveness. Just
today, the Astra-Zeneca vaccine has been pulled from administration in South Africa,
for the reason that it is not sufficiently effective against the variant that
has emerged in that country.
· That
national governments have been scattered, non-collaborative in their approach
to the original production of vaccines, (Operation Warp Speed was an exclusively
American trump-warped program excluding all other nations) and that there is
still no conjoined, collaborative, unified and effective arrangement, under the
auspices of the WHO, to assure equal and universal acquisition, distribution,
funding and storage of vaccines, a measure that will only impale the efforts of
each nation and region, thereby assuring the continuing spread and mutation of
the virus.
· That
the world was warned at least five years ago of the impending certainty of a
pandemic, without taking specific, collaborative, and preventive steps to
forestall, and/or to minimize, and to limit the scope and the severity of the
pandemic.
· That
the failure of the world leaders to take joint, substantive, preventive and then
collaborative action in designing a strategy, and the necessary tactics, in both
public health and ecological prevention measures, is a foreshadowing of the
extremely limited, and thereby further anxiety and depression-inducing reality that
the world is not prepared for the already extant impacts of global warming and
climate change
· That
the separation and the segregation of the public and the private capitalist sectors
of the governments of the developed world, especially in regard to confronting
the impact of both the pandemic and climate change, render the world’s
population victim to a degree and ubiquity of self-serving narcissism in both
camps, to which neither the pandemic nor climate change will be subdued or even
managed effectively
· That
the world continues to experiences the largest spike in refugees, migrants, and
displaced persons from a variety of nefarious and preventable circumstances,
each and all of them compounding the already stretched shared capacity and structures
or world governance,
· That
world leaders continue to bicker over what are deemed to be serious conflicts
among and between various enemies, while the condition of both the world’s
population and the globe’s planetary ecosystems continue to suffer from what
can only be considered political negligence, political indifference, insouciance,
parochialism, provincialism, and an adamantine refusal to surrender a single
iota of what they call sovereignty, for the greater good of humanity
· That
the diplomatic establishment clings to the model, and the modalities of
national sovereignty if and when another country, or its diplomats, dare to
question the practices around ethnic cleansing, detention camps, the poisoning
of political opponents, the state murder of journalists, the public
documentation of corruption by state officials, in another country. And this “hands-off”
approach is not only stultifying and negating any potential amendment to the
abuses in human rights that continue to abound, but also sustains a political “soil”
and climate that will continue to favour and to protect the persons, the agenda
and the greed and corruption of those already steeped in those projects.
· That
the world’s international bodies, such as they are, need to be seriously and
creatively transformed urgently, while the debates in national political
discourse barely cast a glance in the direction of international co-operation,
collaboration, and the surrender of sovereignty, those ingredients that we all
know and affirm are and will continue to be required for the pandemic to be
brought to its heels and the earth’s climate to stabilize
· That
the world’s care and ranking of the care of seniors, especially in facilities
owned and operated by for-profit corporations, demonstrate a degree of indifference
to those in care, and also to those providing care, that can only leave most of
the rest of us appalled, yet powerless to affect the kind of substantive
changes that all families require, expect and deserve.
· That
the long-standing indifference of the American Republican Senators to the urgent
human needs, including the needs of public education, public affordable health
care, and now access to necessary nutrition, while providing trillions of
dollars of tax breaks to the uber-affluent, demonstrate an example, not one
that the world would benefit from emulating but one that will serve to exacerbate
the growing and persistent human casualties, all of whom will wash up on the
shores of the Emergency Rooms, the ICU’s, the police wrap-sheets, the drug
offences, and the morgues, already filled to overflowing with victims of the
pandemic.
To assess the political negligence that we see in too
many governmental establishments as merely short-sightedness, however is analogous
to assessing the pain of a lethal tumor as nothing more than a muscle strain.
Failure to meet the basic requirements of the job of an elected official in an
allegedly democratic state, while not punishable legally, nevertheless,
qualifies as negligence. And for an already exhausted, anxious, depressed and
dispossessed electorate, however, the job of mounting a substantive public
protest, organized, funded, legally guided, co-ordinated and sustained, in such
times, when it is desperately needed, seems beyond reasonable expectations.
As the world’s people face the inevitable compounding
crises of the pandemic, the rise of global temperatures, in a global political
theatre whose ethos and culture are dominated by private interests, dependent
on and insisting on profiting from each and every public initiative, even those
so desperately and immediately needed, where the short-term goals of elected
officials trump the pursuit, in any avid, vigorous and effective manner, those
clearly evidence long-term goals and objectives shared by every person on the
planet, the hopelessness can and will only continue to fester, compounding itself,
and exponentially rising, like a tide of its own making.
And yet, we can all see its inevitability, the
forecasts are indisputable, the schools are only barely functioning for a
generation of kids whose lives will be forever negatively impacted, through the
carelessness of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
It is to these last two groups that this scribe belongs.]
And so long as there are keys to tap, and light to see
to tap them, and fingers mobile enough to continue to tap them, I will continue
to emit my private pray for some kind of recognition, not merely among individuals,
but in families, schools, churches, businesses, universities and colleges and
governments at all levels, that we can no longer tinker and tweek our
situation. Those approaches were minimally useful, perhaps, in the past, except
when the duration and breadth of the emergency (like the First and Second Wars)
compelled immediate and sustained action. Today, however, the urgency is
different: we are not facing tanks, bombs and missiles coming out of the sky.
We are facing micro-virus cells swimming through the air we breath,
contaminating our respiratory systems, while we are also breathing increasingly
poisonous air, and depleting fresh drinking water resources. Just as importantly,
however, we are being fed lies, and prevaracations, distortions and cancerous
propaganda for which we have no vaccines nor antibodies, nor therapeutics.
Our complicity in our own sabotage, especially among
the cultists, seems both unfathomable and suffocating. When grown,
professionally trained men and women agree to become subservient to lies and
personality cults, and their answer to question of fact, is to declare, “we
have an alternative set of facts” then we all know that it is not only a single
voice that is spewing poison. We have armies, in all countries, who are
committed to their own set of alternative facts, and those “facts” do not
include or even begin to tolerate a body of facts that are based in empirical
science, common sense, and some degree of fairness for all.
Unless and until the tide of public discourse and political agendas turns away from being slave to the political class, to being the servant of the public good, and their actions individually and taken cumulatively, shift to embrace the legitimate needs of ordinary people in all countries, we will all continue to suffer more anxiety, depression, hopelessness and fear than is bearable. And that, of course, if precisely the state of the world that these insurrectionist cultists are driving us to. Only then will their campaign of fear and terror will be considered successful. So those of us who, never before, wrote a letter to the editor, or a letter to our elected representatives, or who never hosted a political discussion or open house, or who never before signed up for a political campaign….we all must now consider how and when to sign up…it is no longer a question of IF we will do it. WE HAVE NO OTHER OPTION!
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