I just finished watching a documentary about Amelia Earhart done by PBS American Experience. It details the meteoric rise to fame she enjoyed while learning and dedicating herself to flying and expanding women’s horizons on a grand scale.
Unfortunately the last world record flight she attempted ended in tragic loss of her life. Conjecture about the causes of the loss points to the failures to train, to learn new radio direction finding, egoism, promotional avarice, failure to rest adequately, and a general underestimation of the limits caused by diminished mental acuity.
We find our lives rushing headlong into the future similarly hobbled by our misunderstanding of the hazards that lay before us. A high mortality virus with the ability to spread long before it can be identified in one’s surround is making its way to every corner of the world. Leaders are at first dismissing the threat then eventually admitting the dangers long after the pandemic is deeply seated in the population. The cries for protection equipment, life support equipment, testing kits, and facilities to treat the afflicted are going unanswered as the hundreds of thousands of citizens are sickened and between two and four percent of them die.
The saddest part of this experience is learning that our experts at fighting this kind of fight were dismissed, unfunded, and removed years in advance of this current pandemic. The executive and legislative leaders are now busy saying they are not responsible and are trying to redirect our attention in order to obscure their failures.
It is common in the collapse of civilizations for all of these things to take place. If we could learn from our mistakes this would not have to happen. Our first mistake is to allow others to have such critical control over our life. The second is to assume anything is someone else’s responsibility. The third is to enjoy our bread and circuses instead of organizing an effective correction of this self-inflicted demise.
Get to work!