Collapse
One of the topics that I’ve meant to explore for some time is the fragility of civilization. The First World nations rest at the top of a recognizably unsteady hill. What would it take to bring it all crashing down?
I’ve watched a large number of disaster films during the last year, and I’ve always been a voraicious reader of “the fall of civilization” fiction. Most of it, on screen or in print, is dreck. But the issue of the coming influenza pandemic brings up the issue of cause and effect.
Most Westerners are screwed if they cannot go out to the store and get food. Modern agriculture produces so efficiently that we don’t have to wonder about our next meal. Modern agriculture depends on a number of technological products and engineering services to perform this near magic. Refined oil products, fuels and lubricants, are a big part of that. In the United States, the ability to pump water from great depths or over long distances requires both continuity of connection and a power source(s).
Our food is processed, to preserve it for shipment, to obtain the best part of the food, to make the food agreeable in taste and appearance to the customer. Those oranges you buy in mid-winter aren’t grown orange. They’re colored. Your potatoes have been washed. Your apples sprayed.
Yet, there may be other, more vulnerable places for civilization to be disrupted. How many people know, really understand, how the power grid operates? How the electrical generating plant works? How the nuclear reactor runs? The blackouts in the last decade, in California and in the Northeast, demonstrate a vulnerability. What happens if the power is out for two weeks?
The question I’m asking myself is: how many people have to get deathly ill before our civilization collapses? Obviously the Spanish Flu did not do it. Things are very different now, and technology is both our strength and weakness. If the electric went out right now [well, you wouldn't be reading this] and stayed off for two weeks, what would happen? If disease caused the United States to shut its borders, what would happen?
How many cops get sick before rioting breaks out? How many truck drives before food deliveries break down? SARS was scary because so many health care workers caught it. 21% of the cases were in people we rely upon to take care of us when we’re sick. At what point do the hospitals close because of lack of employees?
It doesn’t have to be a pandemic. Three or four powerful earthquakes, and a couple of related tsunamis, could do it. We saw Katrina, Rita and Wilma hit America’s Gulf Coast. Some of the folks impacted by these storms were still recovering from hurricanes in 2004 or the year before. If we had had the “big one” in California on September 30, and an undersea quake off the Azores had created that “projected” East Coast tsunami on October 15, what could America have done? Hell, Rita meant that Mexican Army troops were in San Antonio, and don’t you think that was a strange sight?
What’s worrying me the most is that the response to the Gulf is so, well, business as usual. I realize that things take time, but I can read the news, too. We aren’t demonstrating that we are the richest, most powerful, strongest nation on earth. Instead, we’re showing the world that we’d rather fight over a penny than pay out a dollar. This is the worst disaster that the United States has ever suffered and it’s just a blip to our economy. If we act like this now, how will be act if we have a real disaster?
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