America's 3 existential threats

None of them are called Russia, China, or Iran. The three existential threats are the climate change crisis, the pandemic, and systemic racism. Of the three, the climate crisis has been with us the longest.

You saw the first stirrings back in the sixties, and you must admit that as “crises” go, this one’s proven itself to have impressive legs. It’s gone a long way from the initial concerns of climate experts over how we’re fouling our nest with our pollution, to global warming, to climate change, to species decline, to the extinction rebellion, and even though we’ve been distracted, this one will come back and wipe us off the planet if the other existential threats don’t do us in first.

Then back in January the pandemic reared its head. This completely new virus, unlike anything previously known to humanity, has laid waste to long-term care homes around the world, snuffing the lives of hundreds of thousands, the vast majority of whom would have moved to the proverbial “better place” within months anyway, and forcing us to shut down, at the behest of medical experts, the global economy at the cost of millions of livelihoods and trillions of dollars.

As if that wasn’t enough of a body blow to our species, within months social scientists had discovered another pandemic even more insidious than covid; systemic racism. Unlike the old in-your-face non-systemic racism of the bygone era, which manifested as slavery, segregation, and lynchings, this new systemic racism is much more subtle, lying more in the domain of the deadly “micro-aggression.”

What do America’s three existential crises have in common? Each of them, being the province of experts, is subject to continuous revision and redefinition, because that’s how things work in the world ‘o experts.

Science evolves, don’t you know! 

And because science, even social science, evolves, you can be bloody sure that by the time humanity devises a fix for any of these malicious maladies, the threat itself will have “evolved,” making our remedies irrelevant, and sending the experts back to the drawing board…

It’s a vicious downward spiral. Humanity is doomed.