The world was incessantly obsessed with Dr. Seuss, but meanwhile the greatest American policy triumph of my generation's lifetime was just passed, the largest government stimulus by a multiple of two that goes a long way undoing decades of crackpot Republican economics. Yet so many of those who did focus on the bill were obsessed with its failures. The fact that this was passed was a miracle in the history of our country, and a lifeline that keeps us going during a period when stability and life itself is no longer guaranteed.
Here are the largest problems of America, all but #1 has no order.
1. Global Warming. The reason is obvious but just to the main point, even before sea level rises, it will destabilize the equator to an unseen level, where nothing will grow and resources will only be preserved by mass murder. The world may arrive at a point where a billion or more refugees are knocking at the doors of more temperate countries, and when they do, our current fights and polarization about immigration will be so much worse than they even currently are. If you think racial inequality is bad now, it is nothing compared to what it will be if we don't put the vast majority of our effort into solving global warming NOW. Time is so close to running out.
- Russia. Circumstantial evidence points to the fact that Donald Trump was transparently a Russian puppet. Putin was the one person in the world Trump never picked a fight with. The FSB has made a long, obsessive study of our government's system, and we were sufficiently weak that there was an enormous opening to exploit. This level of instability has existed in America since the Bush era, and however distasteful many people both here and abroad found the USA, however unthinkingly others loved the USA, most of the world was in denial about its full extent until the rise of Trump pulled the curtain. And however close we were to the kind of chaos we can't possibly fathom in 2015, we're so much closer now.
- Internet propaganda. It is currently mostly a problem of the Right, but unlike in the past, memes don't even have to be movement sponsored. They proliferate straight from the people themselves, and the way each idea gets noticed is by being more extreme than the last. So never underestimate how often and easily through history the power balance on the Left turns from idealistic social democrats to violent left-wing authoritarians, because violent leftist militants are the only part of the entire worldwide left-wing with the will to power to never have moral qualms about the butchery which needs to be done for any left-wing to ascend to power for more than a few years at a time and literally cut their way through democratic gridlock. Everybody who shares any political meme or retweet rather than writing down their own thoughts in detail is contributing to the problem. The country is literally being set up to become a place where a Presidential administration more intelligent than Trump's who means just as ill can read our very thoughts, and act upon us and our families accordingly.
- Bio-terror. We now see how quickly a virus can destabilize the world, and there are both governmental authoritarians and non-governmental terrorists whose only concern is to increase their power and have much more to gain from worldwide chaos. Bio-terror attacks are likely to wipe out 30 million people at a time. We HAVE to set up means for international regulation on bioterror.
- China. As close as we sometimes seem to totalitarianism, China is so much closer. It used to be that the Central Committee installed a new premiere every five years, but Xi means to be a lifetime dictator, and the Chinese social credit system is a whole new level of totalitarianism in which every moment of a person's life can be watched. The far-right and the far-left got exactly what they wished when Trump cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is a disaster of historic proportions that creates an economic network of 5 TRILLION dollars from which the USA is entirely shut out. We soon will no longer have the economic means to monitor China or to influence their behavior at all. There are currently 1 million Uighur Muslims imprisoned in China merely for their religion, all evidence points to their mass torture, mass rape, and mass murder. If you think America could not treat its enemies and underprivileged worse than it already does, you cannot imagine what is coming for some of us if China is ever provoked into war, which is beginning to look ever more likely.
- North Korea: by next year, they will have nuclear capability so strong that they can hit California, and China would easily let them if it means that China can ruin large chunks of America by proxy.
- Guns. 30,000 deaths every year. 300 million privately owned guns, and their not owned by socialists, progressives, liberals, moderates, or sane people. They are nearly the exclusive property of people who think this election was rigged.
- Instability in the Middle East. America has proxies (Saudi Arabia, Israel), China has proxies (Iran), Russia has proxies (Syria). Each of them run by leadership with a tenuous hold on power maintained only by the will to power to enact mass slaughter that can easily embroil any of their benefactors in quagmires abroad, any of which can balloon into global conflict.
- Electoral authoritarianism. Every democracy in the world now has an authoritarian right-wing movement that transparently coordinates among themselves globally to advance their vested interests. First Putin, then Orban, then Polish Law and Justice, then Modi, then Brexit, then Duterte, then Trump, then Balsonaro, each of whom only stand to gain by stalling our ability to deal with any of these problems.
- Republican economics. Piece by piece over half-a-century, the gains of the Great Society have been hollowed out, and with it the increasing depletion of a middle class so that billionaires get everything they want and the rest of the country loses its financial stability. They have the money to basically stay out of global warming's way, they so obviously don't care about whether we live, and it would be in their interests for the world to have far less people to take care of. No matter what comes, and they will hoard their resources so that when they return, it will be that much easier to keep their money to themselves.
Whether now or when our children are our age, war of some sort is coming, authoritarianism of some sort is coming. This is still a golden age compared to what may come next. We live in an 'attention economy' and every moment spent on problems that are less than existential is a moment when our existence draws closer to an end, the underprivileged especially, and whatever gains we seem to have now, they will be entirely null and void in a generation if we do not solve these problems first.
Get serious about the world, or let our loved ones die. That is our choice.
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