What Do We Do, Now?

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 3, 2020

We now live in a pandemic world. SARS-CoV-2 is the viral pandemic, global warming is the climate pandemic, the planetary asset management disaster is the economic pandemic, and the racist resurgence of fascism is the social pandemic. These must be fought together, as none can be ignored.

All of these are communicable human diseases, and we must now begin to deal with them based on our knowledge of how they spread and how to control them. By visualizing all of these as maladies that sicken, incapacitate, and kill people, we can apply what we have learned much more efficiently.

The first realization is that they are all endemic to different extents in the human population. Just as with COVID, we are in this for the long haul. There is no escape, but there are ways to reduce exposure, mitigate the problems, and foster many victims' recovery. But our lives will never be the same again.

The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can begin work on long term mitigation, control, and recovery. As we have seen most brutally in the US, bullshitting a pandemic is totally ineffective. The physical, social, environmental, and political consequences of these pandemics really don’t care what is said, however loudly or repeatedly.

Changes in thinking, attitudes, and actions are all that matter. The source of those changes must be realistic and fully based on our best scientific knowledge. But scientific thinking alone is not enough. We have learned that, too, over the last hundred or so years as we slid into this pandemic pit.

Our scientific knowledge must be fully integrated with the understanding of our spiritual role in the universe, of which we are components. We understand that we have no access to anything but images and illusions in this universe. There is no essential reality, but the reality we build can be either harmonious or disastrous. We are learning just how disastrous when we ignore the rules of reality as sentient beings.

Our scientific and spiritual knowledge must be fully integrated. This is already well advanced as we watched the disasters around us build over the last century. But we are faced with converting older religious systems into tools of the combined pandemics we face. Old and increasingly dysfunctional knowledge systems become sources of disease, sapping our strength and opening us to malignant conquest.

This should be no surprise, but the work has just begun and will continue for generations. That is a time frame tough for modern humans to grasp. In places around the planet with people struggling to force antiquated governments to start on global warming, get organized on control of viral pandemics, restructure the management of our planetary assets for the benefit of all, and to remove the evil of fascist despots, the first decades of the 21st century have been the time to organize and warm-up for the fight.

This century has been one of great hope and horror as parts of our population fell back into the evil of hatred, fear, racism, and mindless greed as the only allowed answer to human suffering. It is not, and the already long lessons of COVID discipline shows us that a less materialist life can be better. Who would have known without the pandemic threat?

As this is being written on election day in the US, most of the planet is hoping to remove one of the ugliest symptoms dragging the planet down. But as many people and I have written, the nation-states and their collapse into fascism are symptoms rather than causes. It is the attitudes of parts of the population that enable such disasters driven by fear, greed, ignorance.

All of our pandemics are entangled. They are a new level of problem and threat at the very edge of our ability to comprehend. They feed off each other and expand geometrically over time. We have never been good at recognizing this type of change's characteristics, but all of us must become experts in seeing, understanding, and agreeing on solutions.

Anything that gets in the way of seeing, understanding, and agreeing is evil and must be quarantined and isolated. Notice how well this fits the model of pandemic control. We need sanitation and clean air systems with masks and careful distancing to protect from airborne viruses and the memes of the old social and political diseases that are as infectious as misinformation and manipulative lies.

In the US, Joe Biden’s success in defeating Trump and the Trump Party would provide hope but no solutions. The changes required are massive, but the majority now recognizes the dangers and the difficulty of long-entrenched endemic diseases socially and economically.

Whatever the election result, nothing in the work that must be done changes. Diseases never stop their destruction until they are eradicated. We will have no break. Time to realize that but take courage from the fact that time and a rising generation that knows reality having had it shoved in their face from birth are standing in line to get started.