Interesting read someone forwarded me

Mar 30, 2020, 10:48 PM

https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/

The Coronation | Charles Eisenstein

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless.

The Coronation | Charles Eisenstein

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Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?

Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?

The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan

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Obesity kills almost 3 million people a year, according to the World Health Organization. It's now widely recognized as worse than smoking for your health. You can google it. Hel1, I've always known that, just common sense... I've known quite a few smokers that lived to be 80 or 90 years old, but I've never seen a 300 lb person that old. And more than once I've seen an article about the "world's oldest man/woman" or whatever, and the picture shows them sitting there smoking a cig. LOL

But obesity? Oh no, you can't even mention that anymore. Man, that's fat shaming. We've even got some cute little nicknames for it now... thick... curvy... etc. I see TV commercials celebrating it, fat women in their bras & panties. Maybe it's time to bring back those cool Marlboro commercials...

Just sayin.

Interesting read someone forwarded me

There's no profit to be made in most of those... With CoVid,

It’s apples and oranges.

Re: Interesting read someone forwarded me

I guess it's time to start "corona shaming"...

I really worry about kids right now, not due to virus

Re: Interesting read someone forwarded me

Maybe I didn't read it thoroughly enough to address it...

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