Dear Editor,
Michael Gerson’s Washington Post op-ed “Public Health efforts
that survived the Trump era” on World AIDS Day (December 1, 2020) offered a
nearly comprehensive detailing of Trump’s impact on public health. But any future book would more accurately be titled
“Negligent Homicide”.
While offering “a chapter” on our GOP policy makers commendable
efforts to avoid the defunding of vital domestic and global programs is warranted
-- more enlightening would be a chapter on how any of our ‘whole of government’ efforts has a massive hole
in it. Our existing federal government and
global governance systems (and structures) persist in preventing massive avoidable
deaths here and abroad from multiple
causes. The greatest cause being from public
health failures linked to ‘independent’ systems and structures. Easily affordable and implementable basic
health care investments need to be made across issues and borders in order to meet
vital goals, but insufficient to ensure our individual freedom and security. A wise investments in just clean water and safe
sanitation alone would eliminate half of all the world’s infectious diseases, saving
hundreds of millions of lives, billions in tax payer dollars, and create healthy
markets for worthwhile global economic progress. But that’s just one essential health investment.
Failing to effectively mitigate Covid19
will undo most progress made in water and sanitation if the people who run those
systems don’t show up for work.
Single bold targets have
been set and achieved before. The
greatest example is the global eradication of Smallpox in the 70s. A onetime US investment of $30 million over
ten years saved US taxpayers over $17 billion (according to a 1997 GAO study). Today that savings would be tripled. Up until Smallpox’s global eradication in the
last century, that virus had killed more people than all the wars, revolutions,
genocides, and homicides in that entire century combined. It didn’t stop environmental destruction or
create world peace.
Covid19 is unlikely to kill as many Americans as the 1918 flu
-- but another raging pandemic will inevitably come -- via nature, human error,
global apathy, or murderous intention. And
it could be far worse. Prevention is
vital! It is the best one-word summary of ‘Public
Health’. Warp speed reactions to health
problems (or any problem) are admirable, but wisdom is profoundly more useful and
cheaper.
Public health requires other preventive investments as
well. Like sustainably protecting humanities
very life support systems (nature) and our global means of governing all spaces
on earth and even in space.
In that context I hope Mr. Gerson will convince all those in
leadership positions (ONE, US Global Leadership Coalition, or the incoming
Biden Administration…) to make fully funding the 17 Sustainable Development
Goals their highest local, national, and global priority. No
need to raise taxes. According to a 2017 Washington Post article “Five myths about
Kleptocracy”, By Natalie Duffy and Nate Sibley (both researchers at
Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative) a 2012 report suggests there
is at least $32 trillion available in private offshore accounts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-kleptocracy/2017/01/04/42b30d72-c78f-11e6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html
The UN’s democratically created and globally approved list
of 17 goals is the only comprehensive solution humanity has ever considered -- since
the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 10th is its
72 anniversary). That post war genius
was thwarted when the war’s victors created a United Nations – a united effort
- and kept the protection of nation state sovereignty supreme to the protection
of fundamental human rights.
We know the result of our own nation making that same error
in its creation. A bloody civil war five
decades later killing more Americans that all the wars our nation has fought in
since then -- combined. Our federation’s original sin still plagues
us today. It appears we are waiting for yet
another major war to confirm that putting state sovereignty above human rights is
a fundamental flaw.
Today, our failing to achieve the holistic and inseparable SDGs
by 2030 will undoubtably thwart the possibility of any future effort to form a
more perfect union…intended to preserve our most cherished freedoms and essential
security. Why? Our independent nation’s incapacity to deal
with the global exponentially accelerating power, affordability, and availability
of every technology. And, every technologies
unalterable capacity to do unprecedented good -- or existential harm. We may already be out of time.
Twenty years ago Woody Allen joked, ‘Humanity stands at fork
in the road. One path leads to utter hopelessness and despair. The other, to complete annihilation.’ He hoped we ‘had the wisdom to choose the
right path’. For the past 5 years the SDGs
have offered another path. Pope Francis’s
recement encyclical recognizes the SDGs as humanities chance to take that path
by following the golden rule.
And, if anyone hasn’t yet watched the new Netflix documentary
“The Social Dilemma” - they owe it to future generations to watch and listen
carefully to its warnings of just social media being an “existential threat.” Then you must resist the concluding
suggestion of the genius tech experts. While
willingly and regretfully detailing their unanticipated mistakes in creating ‘social
media’ platforms - with the intention of bringing us all together (while making
a profit) - some still believe that just tweaking the technology, (or somehow
controlling it) will yield the end result that most of humanity wants. This fits the definition of insane. Doing the same thing over and over… it’s just
crazy.
The documentary does end with a increasing self-evident truth
offered 40 years earlier by the technologist and futurist Buckminster Fuller. “Whether it
is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up the final
moment…Humanity is in ‘Final exam’ as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance
in Universe” Buckminster Fuller.
And if anyone is serious about humanity
working together in passing this test - Bucky also offered the pathway. “You never change things by fighting
the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete.” – R. Buckminster Fuller
FYI: When drafting the Declaration of
Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush (a signer of the Declaration and a good friend
of Thomas Jefferson) suggested that Jefferson use the word “health” instead of “happiness”
as the end goal of any sustainable government.
Thomas
Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense summarized the primary purpose of any
government as maximining human freedom and security. “Wherefore, security being the true design and end of
government, it unanswerably follows that
whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and
greatest benefit, is preferable to all others…Here then is the origin and
rise of government; namely, a mode rendered
necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the
design and end of government, viz., freedom and
security. And however our eyes may be
dazzled with snow, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp
our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and of reason will say, it is
right.” Thomas Paine, Common Sense. 1776
And even before that 1667 John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Toleration implied
sustainable health in his words, “That the whole trust, power, and authority of the
magistrate is vested in him for no other purpose, but to be made use for
the good, preservation, and peace of men in that society
over which he is set, and
therefore that this alone is and ought to be the standard and measure according
to which he ought to square and proportion his laws, model and frame his
government.
What we must acknowledge is at the heart of each of these thinkers and
revolutionists (including the Pope who quotes Jesus and more current wise
souls) is that we know what to do. We always have. We have even pledged “liberty and justice for
all” many times. But we just keep
making the same mistakes again and again.
There’s a word for that.
We must change. Now!
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