August 25 2020
COME HELL OR HIGH WATER….
Come what may, no matter how bad, whatever unnatural calamity occurs, we will not alter our way of life, because our mindset is frozen. If it takes Hell or High Water, Hell now all along North America’s Pacific Coast, and High Water now all along the Gulf, so be it: we will not abandon our carbon-fed luxuries, so we’ll have to face the consequences. And we will: we already are!
I don’t know about you, but this makes me feel anxious: I know, I know, ‘trust in the Lord’ and all that, but still, when I survey what’s going on everywhere, I see no way out.
So, what keeps me going? Well, I am not the passive kind: writing my blog keeps my mind in gear; walking every day 5 kilometer, or biking 11 km, or looking after my vegetable garden, keeps my old body in shape; by the way, my patch of soil has yielded an excellent crop of green beans – now in the freezer – lots of red beets, some already frozen, most still growing, and there are potatoes galore.
This year I have oodles of apples, two varieties, one to keep over winter and the other excellent for apple sauce. And I have made a lot of it, so much, in fact that I use it in my oatmeal porridge instead of milk. Every evening I phone my wife of 67 years, who is in a local new Long Term facility: we chat and sing Dutch Psalms and Hymns together, learned in our youth, and always pray: there always is a lot to pray for. I no longer am allowed to visit her in her private room, but I see her every Wednesday for 30 minutes seated some 5 feet apart. That requires a Virus test every other week, obtained some 40 km away by appointment, strictly adhered to.
Our five children are fantastic, especially our oldest daughter and her husband who come every mid-week for a few days; others visit on weekends or phone. So, yes, considering the testing times, I am doing very well and so does our extended family now multiplied from just the 2 of us in 1953 to 39 today, including 6 great-grandchildren, who grow up in a time much more challenging than when my wife and I married.
And that fills me with a degree of anxiety.
The Times, they are a’changing.
Suffice it to say that we now live in a different world, where, sorry to say, matters will never, ever, get better. During the 1940-45 war I was a teenager in the Netherlands. Then there always was the real prospect of ‘liberation’ and “after the war” to look forward to. Sorry, but such an optimistic vision can no longer be expected, except for The Coming of the Lord.
Now normal life—shopping for food, holding a meeting, going to work, seeing my wife – has shifted dramatically. The world feels different, with every assumption about safety and predictability upended. Will our grandchildren be able to keep their jobs? Will they ever ride a subway again, or take a plane? Now everybody keeps an anxious eye on the ocean and the growing intensity of hurricanes, this week with two storms reinforcing each other. Now everybody is afraid that our TV and radio will beep the threat of tornadoes and unexpected ferocious windstorms of the kind that fell on Iowa and Illinois. And what does an ice-free North Pole mean for weather events? Is the Covid-19 the beginning of a series of pandemics as Global Warming and denuded forests unleash more of the same?
I am afraid that the year 2020 is the start of increasing global perils, because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth. Don’t count on a massive conversion because, even Come Hell or High Water, human nature will not change in spite of scores of books and articles full of warnings. We, all of us, live in denial. Arctic News makes abundantly clear that we already have exceeded the TWO DEGREES Celsius threshold. Trees are life. No trees mean death. A plague of tiny mountain pine beetles, no bigger than a grain of rice, has already destroyed 15 years of log supplies in British Columbia, enough trees to build 9 million single-family homes. They now are chewing through forests in Alberta and Canada’s Northwest, while an outbreak of spruce beetles is devouring forests in the USA and are decimating supplies in parts of Europe. Hosea 8:7 has become a well-known proverb: “We have sown the wind and we now reap the storm, whirlwind, hurricane, whatever.”
Nothing happens in isolation.
Climate turmoil does not happen in isolation: it also happens to affect people in a negative way. Hot weather gives birth to hot tempers and irrational conduct. Stormy weather and natural disasters are not only property destructive, but also lead to strained relationships. Add Covid-19 to the mix, and anything can happen, including an Economic Depression. That’s the reality. But, as T. S. Eliot once said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality is confronting us and it does not look pretty. Suppose, suppose that Trump is re-elected, or contests the results! Two of our daughters live in the US. Eight of our 13 grandchildren reside there. They all are doing well. Even as reality continues to intrude, President Trump has either largely dismissed or ignored his science and medical advisers. And the result is that the economy, the one thing he seems to care most about, and which he hoped would escort him to a second term, has been devastated. The VIRUS cannot be wished away, cannot be ignored. There’s an enormous difference between the US attitude and the rest of the Western world.
Bad as the virus has been this summer, it actually spreads better in low temperatures, and when temperatures fall, more people will be in poorly ventilated areas where transmission is more likely. If the U.S. goes into the fall with new daily cases in the tens of thousands, as they are now, then the numbers could explode and the Morgan Stanley prediction of 150,000 new infections could come true. Considering our containment efforts to date, there is little reason for optimism.
I repeat: We live in totally new times.
It seems that all possible disasters are converging on us. Look at the USA: There the perils of decades of fast food breeding obesity, decades of building spacious subdivisions, making mass transportation and biking or walking to work impossible, decades of under investments in education and hospitals are now emerging. In the wider world, decades of earth-exploitation everywhere, on land, in seas, in the air, are crying for revenge.
The bitter truth is that in the USA, so long as COVID-19 continues to spread at a rate of more than 50,000 new cases per day, the virus will continue to act as a deadweight on the economy, depressing productivity — and total economic output — to well below pre-crisis levels.
Writes John Mauldin in his weekly report, quoting Dr. George Friedman, geopolitical forecaster,
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“I have argued that unless a solution is found by September, the probability that the recession could turn into a depression would mount. A recession is a normal part of the economy, a primarily financial event that imposes disciplines on an overheated economy. A depression, from a geopolitical standpoint, involves the physical destruction of the economy, something that lays waste to businesses, dislocates labor and vaporizes capital. A recession is the economy cycling. A depression is an economy breaking.
Just for the record, there have been five depressions in the history of the US: 1807–1814; 1837–1844; 1873–1879; 1893–1898; 1929–1941. Note the frequency. We haven’t had a depression for 80 years! But today everything, everywhere among humanity and in nature, is under pressure, a phenomenon unique in all of history, but we live in denial, have shut our minds for the total onslaught that’s looming.
Call me a pessimist. Call me nuts. Call me anything. But reality does not lie: HELL and HIGH WATER are just the start.
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