The goal of this blog is to examine the trends that are seemingly leading the modern world toward multiple, intersecting disasters, and to inquire into why we are not taking the appropriate actions to avert them.
At a time when the media is busy blathering on about our “disaster preparedness,” and more money is being spent on threat avoidance than ever, how did it come about that no level of government could cope with a widely- and accurately-predicted hurricane in the Gulf — and that America seemingly continues down this dangerous course? How is it possible that we continue to neglect a rational and effective response to the AIDS pandemic, even as health officials raise new alarms about avian flu and the possible emergence of new and even more catastrophic diseases? How is a supposedly “conservative” Congress repealing taxes on the rich and simultaneously spending us into the poorhouse?
The goal of this site is not to be an “alarmist” web site, even where the facts are truly alarming. It is to understand these facts, and to understand why we persist in disregarding them, even when their consequences are starting to catch up with us. It is to grapple with the reality that everywhere around us the temperature of the water is rising, and like the proverbial frog we seem unable to move ourselves into action.
Indeed, it is arguable that we are not simply “headed for disaster,” but that in many ways we are already there. A huge area of our country remains devastated; a large number of our children remain without adequate nutrition, education, and health care; two million people are behind bars, in many cases for non-violent and non-destructive “offenses”; we are rapidly multiplying the ranks of anti-U.S. militants and terrorists, while leaving in Iraq in worse shape than it was under one of the world’s worst dictators, Saddam Hussein; we are polluting the land, the water, and the air, and pouring enough CO2 into the environment to melt the poles and raise the sea level by 20 feet or more in the next 50 years; we are spending huge sums on the remotest of threats, such as another terrorist attack, while neglecting the much more real and immediate threats of disease, malnutrition, and neglect. How is it possible for us to accept these realities, and continue blithely to try to build new businesses, expand our own and others’ consumption, think we are adhering to Christian (or indeed any religous) values, or even sleep at night?
To understand any of this we need to take another look at recent history, understand what has brought us here, and how we may yet avert even more massive human tragedies than the ones we are already witnessing. We need to look at how past wars, environmental threats, and epidemics were resolved or averted. And we need to understand how our mindsets — whether utopian, cynical, or apocalyptic — affect our perceptions and our behavior, and in many ways shape our interpretations of the facts.
I hope that many conservatives, as well as a few liberals, will read this. I believe that the challenges we face pose as much danger to religion, to free enterprise, and to the unborn as they do to the rest of us, and that if we do not change course we will inevitably end up where we are headed. Disasters are inherently nonpartisan, though they may impact the diasadvantaged and the unprepared more than others. Selective perception is just that — blind to at least one side of the facts. The challenge is to advance a more pragmatic analysis, yet one that is not, like that of the so-called neocons, based on cynicism, dishonesty, and hypocrisy, but is indeed clear-eyed, courageous, and effective whatever one’s prior opinions or prejudices. It is to bring order out of chaos, clarity out of confusion, meaning out of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary global culture.
We welcome contributions that seek to do this. You can post comments, or ask to be added as an author or contributor. We live for the dialogue, for the opportunity to raise our voices and take a principled stand against the forces of confusion, corruption, and oppression wherever we find them. Eventually we may seek to create a book out of it. But for now it is free, organic, and explicitly collaborative.
Jonathan Cloud
Saturday, June 3, 2006
