Expect to see lots more news like this in the coming year.
A total of 746 people have died
in the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe and the figures are rising daily, the World Health Organisation says. […]WHO has warned that up to 60,000 people could become infected if the epidemic is not checked.
The WHO said the number of cases in the country is rising because of a lack of safe drinking water and medical facilities.
There are almost 15,000 known cases of the disease, according to the UN.
Three major hospitals have closed because of the deepening economic crisis, and hundreds of Zimbabweans have been forced to seek treatment in neighbouring South Africa. […]
Caroline Hooper-Box from the aid organisation Oxfam told Al Jazeera that the situation in Zimbabwe is expected to get worse as the rain season is just about to start.
“The problem is that Zimbabwe’s health and sanitation system is completely disintegrated. Cholera is a waterborne disease, and as the rain starts to fall, cholera spreads, further and faster. We’re expecting things to become quite a lot worse, quite quickly,” she said.
A worldwide economic depression means people in the US lose jobs, homes, retirement benefits and health care coverage. In Africa and the rest of the third world it means they die of disease and starvation, war and even genocide. You’re watching the news about riots in Greece today, but not that long ago riots over food were occurring in multiple countries. Expect to see more of them in 2009. And if we don’t turn things around here in the US of A, we might be in for much of the same by 2012.
Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, is renowned for his accuracy in predicting future world and economic events, which will send a chill down your spine considering what he told Fox News [the] week [of November 13th].
Celente says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.
Yes, I know that I’m the local Cassandra around here, but it does seem that the people who predicted the current economic collapse back in 2006 were more than a little prescient. As were the climate scientists who predicted droughts and wild fires, mass extinctions, famine, melting ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, flooding and increases in other severe weather events due to anthropogenic global warming. We are witnessing in our lifetime a confluence of events the magnitude of which humanity has never experienced before.
The question is whether we will address these problems using reason and with cooperation on a global scale, or whether we will do what human beings have done so often in the past during periods of crisis and degenerate into increased nationalism, terrorism, despotism violence, oppression and war. The international institutions which were created in the wake of World War II have so far proved inadequate to the task, with certain rare exceptions most of which have to do with studying and analyzing the current situation rather than implementing effective global action across international borders. Perhaps we need to reform those institutions, or create new ones. But whatever we do, we are running out of time.
This isn’t a crisis that one nation can solve on it’s own. The United States cannot be saved by Barack Obama because the crisis is larger than one nation, and the resources available to America simply do not exist to effect the change we need without the assistance of most, if not all, of the other nations on earth. We are not the Colossus that controlled and manipulated global events as we saw fit in the decades immediately following the end of the last great global conflagration. We have squandered our wealth and our power and our ability to influence events. Our fate is linked to that of every other society on this earth. To paraphrase John Donne, no country is “an island entire of itself” and what happens to one affects each of the others, for we are all intertwined to an extent that was never before possible in history. To borrow another adage from another sage, Ben Franklin, “we must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
We desperately need to adjust our thinking regarding crisis intervention and conflict resolution. Cooperation, diplomacy, respect and compromise must be the touchstones of our relations with the rest of the world. Our only enemies are truly our own prejudices and outdated attitudes, our belief in our own “exceptionalism” or “manifest destiny,” and the policy of unilateral action in pursuit of these delusions of national grandeur which has made the current crisis far worse than it had to be.
The more we (and others, as well) insist on playing up the differences among the various societies of human beings on this planet, and denying our essential community of interest, the less chance we have of exiting the 21st century in better shape than we entered it. Indeed, the lives of literally billions of human beings now living or yet to be born depend upon this radical readjustment in how we address what are truly issues of global concern. Employing our prior methods and practices of relating to one another will only make matters much, much worse. Even for those of us in “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”
Count on it.
