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The New What’s Going On blog has prompted about “In Uncertain Times”. In our days, perhaps more than ever before, we are seeing a wave of inhumanity sweeping the world. It seems that most of the powerful countries have been swept by a rush of dystopic authoritarianism in which an all-powerful leader seizes the reins of government, supported by a small minority plutocracy.
The common people are becoming progressively poorer, powerless and unable to react in a meaningful and life-changing way. Demagogy and easily digested, rose-tinted lies convince the dwindling middle class “all is under control and our countries will become powerful, and the best in the world”. This assures the autocrat in power that he stays in power and has the population under control…
Even someone who is relatively well off, or frankly rich, and has a conscience can become lulled into a sense of false security and ignore the cries of help of those who have nothing. Maybe these well-meaning people are pacified by donations that they give to ostensibly genuine charity organisations, a lot of which are bogus and support a bevy of well-paid staff and corrupt CEOs.
Add to all of this, increasing violence, crime, drug use, abusive relationships, teenage delinquency and criminality, loosening morals and increasing selfishness with decreasing community-mindedness and we have a world that is tottering on the brink of total disaster… Meanwhile, Celia plays her ‘cello…
Celia
Celia plays the ‘cello
And the strains of Bach
Caress the celadon on the mantel,
Exquisitely.
Celia looks out on Central Park,
Knowing that in the cellar
Vintage wine is being cooled,
Appropriately.
Oh, Celia, open your eyes,
And your frozen heart thaw!
Your world is built with lies,
All is not comme-il-faut!
Celia plans her dinner party –
Crystal and silver, eggshell china;
Chantilly lace and damask all laid out –
Beautifully…
Celia content, closes her eyes
And manages to spare a thought
For those who need her charity,
Condescendingly.
Oh, Celia, come on down
See how poor people live;
All’s not too well in town,
Your excess they won’t forgive
The poem is once again set to music, and you can find all my music in my “Otidorchestre” Instagram feed or listen to it on YouTube, Spotify, Amazon, Deezer, Flo, Pandora, and other music sharing sites.
“A nation loses the place which it once held in the world’s history when money becomes more precious to the souls of its people than honesty and labour. A universal, widespread greed of gain is the forewarning of some upheaval and disaster. Civilisations have been born and completed, and then forgotten again and again.” – Colonel James Churchward
Millions of Americans expect to receive $1,200 cheques as part of a $2 trillion stimulus deal that was signed off by President Trump on Friday. This was cited to be a measure to combat a sluggish economy by getting the beneficiaries of this handout to spend it, and thus stimulate the nation’s industries by the direct injection of funds. Other governments of first world countries are commencing similar such releases of funds into their economies, hoping thus to stave off a worldwide depression.
An interesting site to view in light of the President’s announcement is the US National Debt clock. I looked at it mesmerised for a few minutes as the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt increased with each fleeting second. You may have heard of the immense economic strife that Greece found itself in through reckless borrowing of funds and unchecked spending. Currently, every Greek citizen owns about $40,000 USD of their country’s national debt. Terrible, isn’t it? Well, you may think, the US is a more powerful country, with a stronger economy, much more resilient finances and home of the richest people of the world. Think again, each US citizen owns about $73,000 USD of the national debt. Furthermore, each taxpayer in the US owns about $191,000 USD of the national debt.
Play around with the US National Debt site. There is an interesting feature called “Time Machine”. Go back to 1980 and see the National Debt per citizen: About $4,000! A lot of money has been printed and injected into the economy since then to “stimulate” it! By stimulation I understand that means the stock market does well, the few filthy rich get richer, the middle classes do less and less well, while the poor get poorer and poorer, each citizen paying a higher and higher price for a “flourishing economy”.
Coronavirus had infected at least 92,932 people in the U.S. as of Friday 27th March and killed at least 1,380 people, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering. Of course, simply tracking confirmed cases underestimates the actual scale of the problem. Many more cases of infection will lurk in the community undetected. This is particularly the case for a virus like COVID-19 where symptoms can be mistaken for a cold or flu. Without massive investment in testing, cases will always be missed.
New cases of infection and casualties continue multiplying in the USA. New York and Louisiana hospitals are grappling with a flood of patients that threatens to overwhelm their health-care systems, and their resources are dwindling. Meanwhile, the president and political conservatives are increasingly agitating to end drastic restrictions meant to buy time and save lives. The rhetoric is: “Give people a stimulus handout, get them to spend it, and thus end this nonsense over a stupid ‘flu’ which is keeping them from being happy workers and model consumers.”
Politics has always been a dirty game, but especially so in the Trump era. In recent days, a sizeable and growing number of Trump supporters have claimed that health experts are part of a deep-state plot to hurt Trump’s re-election efforts by damaging the economy and keeping the United States shut down as long as possible. Trump himself pushed this idea in the early days of the outbreak, calling warnings on Coronavirus a kind of “hoax” meant to undermine him. The distrust of Science and Scientists runs deep in the psyche of the uneducated, the simple, the ‘average’ person, but also in the twisted mind of the sly opportunists who wish to further their own fortunes no matter what the cost, human lives included.
Epidemiologists are medical specialists who have been educated for decades in order to be able to give advice on how diseases appear, how they occur in communities and in the case of infectious diseases, how the diseases spread and how we can limit that spread. They act based on their knowledge, their experience and the scientific modelling that they carry out in order to protect communities and increase the health of a population. Their role in these days of COVID-19 is to avert massive numbers of deaths and devise strategies in order to stem spread of disease and make the disease disappear. One of the frustrations of epidemiologists trying to prevent disease (rather than curing it, as doctors do and with appreciation of the cured patients), is that it’s often difficult for the public to understand the disasters epidemiologists help them avoid.
A noted epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson published a paper on March 16th, outlining the model of Coronavirus infection and its toll on populations. If nothing were done to prevent COVID-19 infection in the USA, the number of deaths was predicted to reach 2.2 million people. If all patients were able to be treated, there would still be in the order of 1.1-1.2 million fatalities in the US.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call. We are all aware of it, we are all affected by its consequences on our daily existence, we are suffering its effects on our jobs, our leisure, our interaction with family, friends, even strangers. We are all experiencing varying degrees of fear, ranging from foolhardy insouciance, to mild apprehension, to informed alarm, to justified dread, to mindless panic.
We react to the pandemic in direct proportion to our subjective feelings of fear. Foolhardy politicians inject funds into struggling economies and hope that the deaths amongst their political opponents will be higher than the deaths in the camp of their supporters. The rich and famous are mildly apprehensive and plan courses of actions that decrease their probability of contracting the virus (as advised by their exclusive medical care personnel). The thinking, rational, educated person is alarmed and does what epidemiologists and microbiologists advise, lessening their personal risk of infection, but also doing what is best for the community. People who have come in contact with the virus and its effects first-hand are filled with dread and can act irrationally – perhaps justifiably so. The mindless, panic and act unpredictably with often dire consequences.
Open your eyes, unstop your ears, think! Read critically and follow the advice of experts whose job is to protect the lives of everyone in the community – yes, your life too! If you cannot understand something, ask for clarification. If you have been affected personally by illness or death of a loved one, support is available. If you have financial troubles and you cannot cope, there are many places that provide real support and material help – help that goes beyond one-off handouts of money that you spend on consumer goods to support economies and raise stock prices.
You have been asleep in your comfortable, unthinking existence; blithely unaware in your cushy, mindless routine; you have flooded your existence with cheap thrills, huge numbers of consumer goods you don't really need, you have been in pursuit of trite goals. Wake-up! Re-examine your existence. Find again all that is important, really important, in life. Reach out to your family, your friends, your community. If you’re dead, it doesn’t really matter if your stocks do well in the NYSE or if Trump is re-elected (growing National Debt notwithstanding)…
