If you\u2019ve ever wondered what you would do in the apocalypse, look at what you\u2019re doing now.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s your answer.<\/p>\n
OK, before you either panic or tell me I\u2019m overreacting, let me break some of that down.<\/p>\n
First off, while I am using apocalypse in its current casual meaning of a collapse of civilization, I\u2019m not including the various religious interpretations. This isn\u2019t the fundamentalist End Times.<\/p>\n
And in truth, I don\u2019t mean the end of the (human) world, because I\u2019ve never believed that was going to happen even at the height of the Cold War when the US and the Soviets were rattling so many missiles at each other.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re not going to all be living in caves or in isolated groups with no access to the many things we humans have developed over the years. We\u2019ll even have a lot of the good things left.<\/p>\n
But we are already in a period of change and chaos, some of it extreme and much of it causing a great deal of human suffering. It\u2019s going to keep happening. Of course, like everything else in this world, it will not be equally distributed.<\/p>\n
So despite the fact that some of that change is going to be catastrophic, you\u2019re still going to have to pay your taxes, get the groceries, and take the cat to the vet, all while trying to dodge the crisis du jour, whether pandemic, disaster, or political.<\/p>\n
From the way things look right now, we\u2019re going to continue to have all three of those crises for the foreseeable future. <\/p>\n
We\u2019ve got record-breaking pandemic numbers all over the US right now, even in highly vaccinated areas. Hospitals are once again getting overwhelmed. The only saving grace seems to be the death rate, which is lower because even though vaccinated people are getting sick, they\u2019re not getting as sick.<\/p>\n
Apparently our only pandemic plan was to vaccinate all Americans. Not everybody in the world, just Americans.<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t plan to do anything else, even though it\u2019s been obvious for at least six months that the vaccine plan wasn\u2019t going to do it, partly because of anti-vaxxers and partly because there are other countries on the planet.<\/p>\n
The current plan seems to be to leave us all on our own to figure out what we\u2019re supposed to do, as Professor Zeynep Tufekci pointed out in a brilliant op-ed in The New York Times<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n We need quick tests and quality masks for everyone, along with substantial work on ventilation systems. I\u2019m not sure why we aren\u2019t getting those things, except that it doesn\u2019t fit the \u201cit\u2019s almost over\u201d narrative.<\/p>\n And as long as we don\u2019t make sure the whole world has vaccines and treatments, we\u2019re going to get more variants. Despite the many nasty laws around national borders, it\u2019s a small world and the virus isn\u2019t stopped by Border Patrol.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s climate change, which is finally being recognized as the cause of any number of disasters even as no country is doing what\u2019s necessary to keep things from getting much, much worse.<\/p>\n