Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Sunday, October 25, 2009

The World Under Threat

It seems that way, on many fronts. Environmentally, with the onset and creeping advance of climate change, and all that this threat can mean to all living things on this Earth, and most particularly to the human creatures that inhabit the globe. And there is the relatively new and fearsome threat to societies around the world posed by the advance of humanity's various group adherences from religion, to political, to social and ideologically dysfunctional views and fundamental antipathies to one another - most latterly evidenced in fanatical Islamism.

We've also fixated globally on the potential of viral agents that might have the potential to wipe out entire populations - or, at the very least, decimate those populations. Which is to say, one in ten people on earth, according to this disease-fixated scenario, might suffer an early death because of a pandemic whose source is puzzling, but exotic and deadly. And medical science, working feverishly to identify symptoms and isolate vectors and disease mechanisms on the human body, may not be able to synthesize the vital data adequately to fashion a working response to save millions of lives. One new disease or viral agent after another surfaces to worry us: is this the one?

We strive to understand the monumental threats posed against us, but the very threats themselves are so complex and dire that fear takes hold and throttles reason. If, as it has been said by those wiser than the common man, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself - fear of the dread unknown. Which our feverish imagination works overtime to present us with the reality that there can be no coping mechanism for a threat so all-encompassing, then we are liable to see global panic ensue. The result of a general atmosphere of helplessness to cope. In response to which, global authorities and regional powers pull together to assume a position of trust and function.

On the basis of what we have experienced thus far is it possible to understand that those in authority are no more capable of producing reasoned and workable solutions than the people who depend on them to bring society in general into an atmosphere of trust in public authorities that will lead us all to a safer place? We've just begun surfacing from a global economic collapse. And it seems clear from the steps taken by the international community of world leaders that they're groping about for solutions to a financial collapse they barely understand, and in the process mounting colossal public debts that their populations will be burdened with before balance and prosperity resumes.

All the world's advanced societies, non-Muslim and Muslim alike, along with impoverished nations incapable of adequately defending themselves against the agonizingly determined advance of armies of fanatical non-state militias for whom life in an afterworld is more dear than life on Earth, seem incapable of stripping away the allure of martyrdom and hatred. Collective and individual state military action on the part of beleaguered nations have thus far only appeared to stimulate an aura of ferocious Islamist-inspired chaos, where the disease of hatred and conquest has infiltrated every country on earth, insidiously appealing to adversely-disaffected youth.

We observe the effects of climate change as weather patterns inexorably appear to be changing, leaving us confused and troubled about receding ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, threatening to raise ocean levels and sink vulnerable land masses in areas of the world where nothing can be done to save densely populated areas. Year-over-year drought situations have caused poor-to-little crops to be realized, to feed a hungry world. In other areas, deluges have also ruined crops by rotting and drowning them, and causing vast floods imperilling human habitat. Desertification is steadily creeping forward. Potable water sources are receding and drying up in areas of the world already suffering lack of water.

And the world Health Organization is doing its utmost to add to the perplexity of where to turn first to defend the world community from the onset of all these threats. Warning that "the whole of humanity is under threat", the head of WHO claimed that H1N1 influenza had reached a pandemic phase. Countries and communities have been reacting, to try to counteract the threat of another round of a viral agent that proved fairly innocuous the first time around. Killing far fewer people in its rounds than what annually results from normal, seasonal flu. On the other hand, its victims, few as they are, have been those normally not under threat by seasonal flu.

So that stories abound about this new health threat to the well-being and longevity of the human population, as 191 countries have been struck by this new strain of flu, leaving five thousand people dead, and dread in the hearts of those who fear for the safety of their loved ones. Perspective tells us that this novel influenza strain for which two widely available drugs have been developed for useful vaccinations, has killed a relative few in six months, since that same number succumbs to seasonal flu, every six days. But fear is fear, and it is even more contagious than that which is feared to threaten our survival.

We appear to be hard-wired to succumbing to the worse-case scenario in every instance of a presumed threat that causes us to lose perspective, and surrender in panic to the irrationality of helpless hopelessness. This too, is part of the human condition.

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