The medical aspect of the coming presidential election is intriguing. There are vicious arguments about how much it will cost to continue Obamacare, or to initiate Warren’s and Sanders’s Medicare-for-All.
Ignored in the arguments is the vast sum proposed by the Trump administration to totally refurbish our Nuclear arsenal. Lost also is the increased cost of our over-all defense and intelligence budgets. The last are about $2 trillion combined. Hundreds of $billions are projected for the nuclear upgrade.
No one attempts to reconvene long lost talks among the planet’s various leaders about rationally doing away with Nuclear weapons. Our planet’s “Leaders” are profitably complicit in maintaining the world’s most profitable business: Defense Manufacturing.
This proceeds in the United States too, where elected officials get lifetime free medical but can’t provide it for all the rest of us. Meanwhile, the issue emerging as the most important in the world is humanity’s defense against the natural elements of the Universe, most visible in Climate Change.
The world’s politicians are so involved in securing their own financial security, they can only barely acknowledge the human race may be precariously playing with the seeds of, if not actual extinction, at least the continued suffering of about a third of the planet’s people.
The universe, and our place in it, is not guaranteed to be safe. On the contrary, it is increasingly clear that our environmentally secure presence on the planet is endangered by our economic activities
It is a gamble with our lives akin to the odds provided in Roulette. It appears to those of us with a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, a car to drive, a tv to watch, a computer, cell phone, and food in the fridge, that all this is acceptable.
The facts of the situation are, however, poorly considered by most of us. As long as we get our three square meals a day and a good night’s sleep, we continue to allow the profit motive to trump survival, passively disregarding the potential danger to our species.
You can’t easily talk about this subject in Tweets. So, the subject usually gets fitted into the daily news as just one more item. Some days it doesn’t even show on the news. You have to Google on the Internet to find it.
Life or Nuclear Bombs is a poor title for this piece. People Not Thinking would be better. I began this commentary with healthcare, and as easily as yawning slipped into defending ourselves against the Universe. This transformation feels as natural to me as falling off a log.
While millions starve to death, die of disease, war, natural disaster, and criminal activities, a tiny fraction own multiple houses, multiple cars, multiple yachts, and multiple bank accounts. The rest of us just keep going on as if it doesn’t matter.
What is it when one percent of all people own 90% of everything and the rest of us are silently complicit, passively helping trap millions of people in a lifelong struggle for simple survival?
