Our Brutal Future
The ability to ignore reality is rapidly disappearing
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 3, 2020
It is tough to face what is happening. Even forty years of studying revolutionary and paradigmatic change and the types of disasters do not stop your attention from sliding away from what you need to see.
As we are repeatedly now told, not by the official media that is still delusional, but by everyone else with any expertise, this is becoming the biggest disaster in modern history. The only comparisons and none are more than approximate, are the Great Depression or World War II.
No, it can’t be! Your mind refuses to accept that. Those are the horrors of history and, in America, we know that history doesn’t mean anything. In our world, history is rewritten every day by the inhabitant of the White House. Its all lies that only mean anything if you are making up the story.
But there are family stories, maybe even grandparents who remember and usually refuse to talk of the horrors, as well as thousands of hours of film and millions of words that say those things were real. The contemporary destruction of fact for short term political points leaves us now, with vast amounts of information that we cannot process. But all that unprocessed data leaves a soul sickening fear that we are confused and helpless in the face of brutal reality.
These disasters happen, and we are now in the grip of one, and it is planetary. Our government has wholly failed where other nations have reacted with honesty and all available resources, even if they stumbled in the realization of what we face. We have nothing, and we are the richest of all.
New York is a week away from needing to leave patients to die to conserve medical supplies that should have been there. The rules of triage in disasters are part of contingency planning with everyone in government and healthcare, having worked through the criteria for making these terrible decisions. Establishing the process doesn’t lessen the tragedy but allows everyone to know what they must do and when they must do it.
This type of planning is totally beyond the current US regime, and previous plans were destroyed as a waste of money just as the systems for pandemic detection were damaged. Power and greed are all that matter.
Power gives control to exploit, destroy, and punish enemies of those with power. So we, as a people, are now without power and hope. We allowed our control to be taken away by the oldest scams and were too exhausted from our quest for greed to do anything but throw up our hands and say, it doesn’t matter anyway. What will happen?
The US’s current descent to hell is what happens.
The best estimate by people with knowledge and skills is that we have two years before this is under control. We still know so little in so many places that the problems of complexity rules. There are too many variables and too many ways these variables can interact dependent on local conditions. This immediate disaster will be over before we grasp what happened.
But thousands of scientists are working in unity around the planet to learn, control, treat, and then defeat this disease with a vaccine or vaccines. But for eight billion people, that will take a year to implement. Two years is the emerging timeline that is, in all likelihood, fixed.
In the US, a mighty effort was made by the corrupt and crippled federal government to implement a small $2 trillion emergency fund. Despite the fully visible future before us, most of that effort was in overcoming attempts to block or reduce the aid package by the Trump Party. Why waste money on those that will die anyway? That those numbers include their constituency shows the depth of moral collapse.
As is only being alluded to very indirectly in the official media, the aid to 98% of our businesses, and to the 10 million now unemployed means enough to survive for about one week, maybe two. For the bulk of the population with no savings and the luck to have a job, if they simply keep working and spreading the disease, they can keep going until they become sick.
My estimate, as far as I can make myself try to understand this reality, is that we are two or three months from the need for massive, public kitchens, and then riots as the disease and staggering federal incompetence cripple what is still working.
My point here is not to detail the process as that is hopeless in this situation. We are riding a monster that is destroying us far beyond our willingness to admit. The point is that these known processes just epidemiology can predict for the data gathered the vectors of these diseases. While the sequence of this pandemic is precise, it can go in many ways. But we are learning more every day though that does not change the trajectory and the timeline to herd immunity for the entire human population.
We all, in each country on this planet, need to play the cards we have been dealt. There will be a massive realignment of all human social structures as this plays out and those with the worst cards will lose the most. It doesn’t matter if it should not have been that way. The results will be what they are.
For the US it appears that we need at least $4 trillion, maybe more, per month for the rest of this year to provide an adequate living for a 30% unemployment rate with rapidly failing businesses.
The US economy and the neoliberal international economy are gone. We will need to rebuild a new, planetary economy that is fully sustainable. I’m not saying this will happen, but for our species to survive, it must. If it does not, we will be playing very quickly with no cars at all.
Within two weeks, this will be unquestioned except by those in delusional states or suffering from dementia. People in a delusional state in a significant disaster have difficulty surviving. That is also a tragedy we will have to accept.
