Why COVID-19 (and Trump) is a Good Thing
We humans are really good at forgetting. As one of my favorite authors Graham Hancock has said, “we’re a species with amnesia.” This is seen all the time in our current fast-paced, content-overload world. People will be up in arms about something one week, and a new headline the next week makes people forget.
That forgetful rhythm of react > move on > react doesn’t get us anywhere. In fact, it keeps the masses distracted from the important things while those pulling the strings behind the scenes continue to consolidate power and hoard wealth.
It’s a continual state of fear-based reactions that keep us divided and disempowered to take action towards improving our own lives and the state of the world at large.
How the future looks is not by any means guaranteed. It is created by the collective vision of people all over the world that take action. We’ve been on a trajectory that looks pretty Orwellian and dystopian… edging ever closer to a full-blown surveillance state with polluted food, air, water, poverty and superbugs that can rip through a population.
It does not need to look like that.
But because we are such a complacent, reactionary species we need certain ‘bad’ things to happen in order to trigger people into collective action — to wake people up into realizing that our future is not guaranteed.
As the great visionary and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller said, “The best way to predict the future is to design it.”
The key word that we need to keep in mind when designing our future is resilience.
Obviously the sickness and death that is being caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic is not a good thing. However, it might be exactly the type of situation we need to be presented with to better prepare for our future.
COVID-19 is a very unique opportunity for both local communities and the larger global community to see first hand how fragile our systems actually are.
We were not prepared for this outbreak, and would certainly not be prepared for one that is much worse. It has exposed the reality of our failing and inadequate systems that has been present the whole time, but was all too easily overlooked while it was ‘business as usual’.
The same goes for President Trump. Obviously his incompetence, arrogance, racism and self-promoting agenda is not a good thing in itself, but it does provide a unique opportunity for people to respond to his administration by creating a path forward that leads to something great. We can react accordingly to his presidency to snap forward into a brighter future with more force, as if his ugliness is the pulling back of the bow string.
The COVID-19 pandemic is showing us the great failure of our existing systems. Nothing is more dangerous for us as a society than slowly failing systems that in ‘normal times’ seem fine but are actually bleeding out towards death. A global pandemic and massively unqualified president act as a mirror to blatantly show us what problems have been discreetly existing in the background, covered up by the day-to-day noise of endless news and fear-mongering headlines.
It’s too easy for people to think that the way things are now are the way that they have always been and always will be. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Systems are always in flux. As they say, the only constant is change… and we really need to make some change.
Hopefully we don’t need a global food crisis to realize how fragile our food systems are.
Hopefully we don’t need a global energy crisis to realize how fragile the power grid is.
Hopefully we don’t need a global ecology crisis to realize that pollution needs to stop.
Hopefully we don’t need another global financial crisis to realize how fragile our monetary system is.
Hopefully we don’t need another global health crisis to realize how fragile our healthcare systems are.
