Ticking down to our future

Choose. Every day we make choices.

I choose to get my news from NPR, National Public Radio. I read the local newspapers and, on Sunday, the Seattle Times.

If there is a Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times,” I have heard it called a curse and not a blessing. To us, us frogs in a pot of water slowly warming on the stove, life might seem normal. Trust me, it is not.

The impeachment of President Trump is historic, but it might take 10 years for the facts to all come out and sink in.

More critical to our future is climate change, which destroys communities with catastrophic weather, but worse, is destroying whole societies. Droughts and famines are a root cause of civil war, low intensity war, the breakdown of government and the source of massive international migration north to Europe and the United States.

Last week NPR reported the hands of the Doomsday Clock being moved forward to 100 seconds to midnight. Separately, they covered the gathering of 22,000 gun rights activists in Richmond, Virginia’s capital. Some at the rally voiced concerns that our nation is on the brink of a civil war.

Maybe this Clock needs to be called the “Democracy Clock.” Here is from the memo the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists posted on their website Jan. 23 when the 2020 Doomsday Clock Statement was made. They addressed it to you:

“To: Leaders and citizens of the world

“Re: Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight

“Date: January 23, 2020

“Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers – nuclear war and climate change – that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.

. . .

“Continued corruption of the information ecosphere on which democracy and public decision making depend has heightened the nuclear and climate threats. In the last year, many governments used cyber-enabled disinformation campaigns to sow distrust in institutions and among nations, undermining domestic and international efforts to foster peace and protect the planet.

. . .

“This situation – two major threats to human civilization, amplified by sophisticated, technology-propelled propaganda –would be serious enough if leaders around the world were focused on managing the danger and reducing the risk of catastrophe. Instead, over the last two years, we have seen influential leaders denigrate and discard the most effective methods for addressing complex threats – international agreements with strong verification regimes – in favor of their own narrow interests and domestic political gain.”

Scientists warning that international and internal threats to our democracy move humanity closer to mutual self-destruction gets a newspaper’s editor’s attention. My job, like all lovers of democracy, is to let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Fellow citizens, we, as always, have choices before us. “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” Paul Simon sang 50 years ago. People have the right to read the political winds and see a heavy handed government crushing their freedoms. That is a choice.

Others measure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and count the destruction wrought by wildfires and hurricanes. They combine that with the rise in tension between and within nations and the tossing aside of hard won agreements on the use of nuclear weapons and they calculate the world is closer to doomsday then it has ever been before.

So choose. The brink of civil war? Or are we boiling so slowly that we will not know the moment our goose is cooked?

– Ken Stern

About the Doomsday Clock: “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock [in 1947], using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet.

The decision to move (or to leave in place) the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates.

The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change and disruptive technologies in other domains.

(https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/)