The coronavirus pandemic has taken a terrible toll on humanity while simultaneously delivering a staggering blow on the global economy. The greatest and gravest mistake we can make is focusing all our energy and efforts on returning life to “normal” without examining this relationship between pandemics and environmental destruction. People need to realize that environmental destruction, deforestation and climate catastrophe are the casual factors for future pandemics that will make COVID-19 look like a sneezing outbreak.
Unprecedented environmental destruction coupled with the sheer insanity of spiraling U.S. military spending provides civilization with only a minimal chance of survival.
Keep in mind that the United States spends 70 times more on the Pentagon than it does on global public health programs. In 2019 the United States spent $35.1 billion on its nuclear arsenal alone. The Pentagon plans on spending $1.7 trillion more in the coming years on “nuclear modernization” which includes the introduction and deployment of “low yield nuclear weapons,” which are sanctioned for first strike use in conventional conflicts.
In January scientists moved the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than it has ever been before.
COVID-19 confirms that humanity is at a fork in the road. We have the opportunity and perhaps the momentum to design, build and maintain a global health-care network which includes meeting head0on the realities of environmental destruction and climate catastrophe. We have seen briefly the incredible power and potential of people working collectively to insure the greater good and that has been breath taking. Or we can relent, buckle and acquiesce to the damning power and dominance of the U.S. military industrial complex. An honest appraisal will cast the needed light on the co-joined twins of the apocalypse: environmental destruction and U.S. militarism.
Jim Sawyer
Edmonds
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