Coronavirus response. What about prevention

Dear Editor, 



Dear Editor,

Klain and Larie used the word “response” to new outbreak (The Coronavirus has landed. Now what? Wpost 1-23-20) repeatedly (at least 4 times). 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-coronavirus-has-landed-in-the-us-heres-how-we-can-reduce-the-risk/2020/01/22/afebe9ee-3d53-11ea-baca-eb7ace0a3455_story.html

But never the word ‘prevention’.  The same with the Post’s editorial on the back side of the op-ed.  Prevention is looking increasingly ‘unAmerican’.  Both the media and our dysfunctional political system continues reacting to problems instead of seeking and addressing the systemic causes of any problem (terrorism, climate change, health care spending…).  No wonder our nation’s financial debt and problem solving deficit continues to grow.  As well as the number of problems that are ultimately all interrelated.   

This indisputable fact of our interconnectedness adds to the insanity now of so many unsustainable problems before us.   Yet “Independence” is the fundamental organizing principle of our government, it’s departments, and the United Nations system and structures.   Our westernized human thinking likes to keep things separate but this has a profound cost when everything is interdependent.  

Listen to any Cspan program detailing solutions to any problem and the experts will suggest the need for -- a comprehensive, wholistic, whole of government, or whole of society -- approach.  Then they urge policy makers to build resilience.   They instinctually or consciously know interdependent problems cannot be solved by independent political systems that we have engineered within our government, our nation, and our world.

I’ve found at least 88 unsustainable trends over the last few years.  More each month.  Yet there is zero mention in newspapers or congressional hearings regarding the need to fund and meet the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals by the year 2030.  At this pace and procedure humanity will be lucky if civilization is sustained untill then.  The evolution of weapons, war, and pathogens appear to be a far greater threat than climate change.

 Things change!  Can we?