Are We Living Through the Beginning of the Great Unraveling?
Let’s Write a Different Ending
By Jim Miller
With more and more good news about the decline of Covid-19 and the efficacy of the vaccines, there is a growing feeling in the United States that the heavy despair and anxiety of the last year is slowly fading. In just weeks, California will be opening up as will New York and other centers of American life, and the sense is that it will be a giddy summer of ballgames, concerts, and long-postponed vacations.
Surely, we deserve it.
As more and more people unmask and let loose, maybe we’ll finally get back to some sense of normalcy. You can almost physically feel the hope bursting out on the streets in some quarters. Sure, there’ll be more waves of unvaccinated people getting sick, but the worst is over for the well-vaccinated.
But, of course, that’s not the story in India or Brazil as dystopian scenarios unfold featuring horrendously overburdened healthcare systems and bodies literally being burned en masse for lack of any other means of dealing with them. Indeed, the contrast between the emerging good fortune of the global north stands in stark contrast to relentless suffering in the global south. With the United States and other wealthy nations slow to share a glut of vaccines with the rest of the world, particularly with those countries that are the poorest, it seems clear that the cruel wages of economic inequality will characterize the bitter end to the bitterest of years in recent memory.
For those of us who have read a lot of dystopian fiction, there is an eerie familiarity to it all. Right when people should have been awakened to the deep inequities that the pandemic exposed, they returned to business as usual, setting up the next big disaster that could have and should have been prevented. So it goes.
It’s not just the horrible scenes of the pandemic raging through nations poorer than our own, it’s the tinder box nature of our geopolitical reality as illustrated by the explosion of violence unleashed in the Middle East. Vast inequality, raging nationalism, climate disaster, and war-all-the-time are not just the stuff of futurist novels; it’s the dystopian now of our present.
If that seems hyperbolic, consider this from the New York Times last week:
Storms, floods, wildfires — and to a lesser degree, conflict — uprooted 40.5 million people around the world in 2020. It was the largest number in more than a decade, according to figures published Thursday by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a nonprofit group based in Geneva that tracks displacement data annually.
It was all the more notable as it came during the worst global pandemic in a century.
Extreme weather events, mainly storms and floods, accounted for the vast majority of the displacement. While not all of those disasters could be linked to human-induced climate change, the Center’s report made clear that global temperature rise, fueled by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, “are increasing the intensity and frequency of weather-related hazards.”
Exhausted as we all are after a year of horror, domestic political upheaval, and radical uncertainty at all levels from our personal lives to the global political landscape, the last thing we should be doing now is disengaging from the world, as tempting as that may be. If those of us in the privileged global north let our sense of entitled self-indulgence rule the day, we may very well end up thinking back to this very moment as the time that we blew our last big chance to right the course of history.
Now is the time to fundamentally address economic inequality at all levels, make the leap toward a just transition away from fossil fuels, and be led more by compassion than narrow, short-term self-interest. If not, we can be sure that the billions of those less fortunate than us in the global south won’t go quietly away to whimper as we enjoy ourselves to death.
In that story, the present moment will only serve as a prelude to the next dark chapter in which nobody wins.