The Tornado of Life
I’ve never really been in a Tornado, a Hurricane, a Tsunami or a Derecho. At least I don’t think I have. I was once riding my motorcycle across a vast open plain in Southern Utah and there was a small dust whirlwind off to my left in a field and I watched it as it came toward the road I was on. It caused me to pull over and watch it, not knowing or thinking about what I would do if it suddenly changed course and started heading toward me. It didn’t look so big (it was perhaps 100 feet tall and about four or five feet across at ground level), so I didn’t really think I was in much danger, but I was wary nonetheless. As for hurricanes, I lived through Super Storm Sandy in 2012 and I suspect that was more of a hurricane than most storms that get that far north, but some technicality (probably for purposes of the insurance industry) kept it from being classified as a hurricane. We evacuated to our house in Upstate New York for a week and then had to stay in the W Union Square, compliments of Chubb Insurance while our building in the South Street Seaport had its basement un-flooded. The storm had brought ten feet of water into the basement and and about three feet into the lobby floor and so it did cause some serious damage to the building systems. But we never felt at risk of life and limb. I’ve only heard about tsunamis and derechos and never really come close to one. Even a natural disaster like a wildfire, something we out on this hilltop pay close attention to, has not yet come close enough to give us real concern even though I watched a small six acre version get doused to our west next to Rt.15. I guess the closest thing to a natural trauma that I have lived through is a blizzard, but that was more in my youth in Maine. The snowbanks reached up to twelve feet high and it took three days to shovel out, but again, it was more fun than dangerous in its feel.
Others are far less fortunate when it comes to natural disasters. I am watching the horrors of the recent 7.8 earthquake in Turkey and Syria with its death toll to date over 7,500 people. I don’t recall the massive earthquake in the same area that happened in 1999 that killed over 25,000 people. I think we can assume that natural disasters have been with us since the beginning of time. The story of the Great Flood may have been the first we can easily reference with recorded history, but its fair to suggest that there were other events prior to that which were just as devastating to human life. These natural disasters seem to be nature’s way of shrugging off the suggestion that humans rule the world. We don’t. We are merely flotsam and jetsam in the Universe and the sooner we accept that the more likely we will be to not take ourselves so seriously and perhaps spend more time helping each other rather than fighting each other.
Back in 2013 when i wrote my first book about the global pension crisis, I was heavily engaged in global demographics and the dots that sere clearly connecting to form a picture of a future for mankind that was in peril of a combined economic and demographic disaster that would being with it as much harm and devastation as any natural disaster. I think it might be fair to say that I felt that the global pension crisis was on the order of magnitude for mankind as the Great Flood. I called it a “species defining event” because it pitted old against young and haves against have nots in massive proportions. I used to tell my Cornell business school classes that it was the the biggest trend that would define their carers and lives going forward. I never sensed that the students really believed that altogether, but I assumed that planting that thought in their consciousness might help them as events gradually unfolded in the future. Then COVID hit.
I found myself living through the first real pandemic of our lifetime. I was not alone in being awakened to the reality that the world had experienced an equally impactful pandemic in 1918. In some ways I found it funny that our collective memory and awareness of pandemic risk was simply not that great before COVID. We all enjoyed the drama of movies like Outbreak, but things like Ebola seemed like distant risks to us and something akin to the Armageddon of a meteor strike. It has recently occurred to me that when I heard in early 2020 that COVID might be with us for two years, I thought that was an exaggeration. Now, at three years, it feels like pandemic risk needs to join the panoply of species risks we face and try to protect against while ignoring enough to carry on a somewhat normal life for ourselves. I think it is fair to say that we all recognize that pandemic risk is far more likely in an overcrowded world of eight billion souls, just like natural disaster risk is far more likely in a world where climate change is being spurred on by continued reliance on hydrocarbon usage for energy. These may be somewhat debatable issues, but the strength of the con debate is getting harder and harder to hold up its end. We all understand that the world has become a riskier place and that we as a species have a lot to do with that and are responsible for finding some sort of solution to it all if we are to survive.
Presumably, one of the advantages that nature has bestowed on mankind is the ability of cognitive reasoning to enable us to find solutions to big problems, even and perhaps mostly those of our own creation. We are certainly putting forth plenty of effort to solve the problems, but we are also probably doing less to prevent the ill effects than we might. That implies a touch of species-driven fatalism that is less than helpful, but it is probably also simply part of the human condition, as it is called. None of us do all the things we should and most of us do things that hurt us whether we want to or not.
The thing that is concerning me this morning is based on an article ai recently read in the New York Times about a family that immigrated into Texas and then was first hammered by COVID and then lost their home to a flood. This one-two-three punch of displacement, pandemic and disaster has then been given a chaser of further economic hardship. It seems fewer and fewer Americans are able to afford a home and now, afford a home that they can afford to properly insure to be able to obtain a proper long-term mortgage. And of course, Fe were and fewer can afford the health insurance to protect against biomedical risks which are only getting greater in these times. This painted a picture of a population of people that are sinking further and further away from what we used to call the American Dream. And if that is not bad enough, we seem to be galvanizing ourselves to protect what we have by building walls and trying our best to keep these people with fundamental needs of life out of our sphere by ignoring their problem in the name of natural selection. We try to make ourselves feel better by sending teams to help the earthquake victims in Turkey while ignoring the refugee problems of Syria and the atrocities of authoritarianism in both Turkey and Syria that add to the problems.
What I am feeling this morning is that our world is creating a compounding and accelerating tornado of life for a growing portion of the human race and all the gains we have made through technology and innovation may get erased very quickly if we don’t recognize that this tornado is ruthlessly heading towards all of us and our children. We can no longer ignore it and must start chasing it and finding ways to actively defeat it.