So Many Problems—Part Two

by Errington C. Thompson, MD –

Last month, I discussed some of the problems facing America.

I believe these problems have been festering for years, if not decades. Water shortages out West, military spending, toxic waste, burning of fossil fuels, abortion rights, chronically low wages, gerrymandering which makes it impossible to get represented at the state level or in the US House, and crumbling infrastructure—these are just a few of our problems.

We can’t sweep these problems underneath the carpet; we have to face these problems in order to solve them. If we don’t, civilization as we know it will disintegrate. I’m not talking about political disagreements between the Right and the Left; I’m talking about issues that will cause our society to collapse.

Many years ago, I mentioned the book by Rebecca Costa called the Watchman’s Rattle. This excellent book argues that great civilizations of the past collapsed because those civilizations could not figure out how to solve some huge systemic problem.

In the case of the Mayans, she contends that the Mayans faced water shortages for decades. Their society collapsed because they could not figure out how to supply enough water for all their needs.

The Khmer Empire, which thrived in Cambodia and surrounding countries for nearly 600 years, suddenly and mysteriously collapsed like the Mayan culture. Why? It appears they had the opposite problem as the Mayans: they had too much water. Controlling the water was a constant battle, so they built a series of canals and dams. Unfortunately, one catastrophic failure caused massive flooding. It caused damage to their canal system, for which they never recovered.

What does this have to do with us? I would argue “Everything!” The premise of Ms. Costa’s book is that these civilizations ran up against a problem they couldn’t figure out. This is a cognitive roadblock. If a society cannot solve its problems, the community will collapse.

Climate Change

For decades, scientists have argued that our planet is warming, which is secondary to us burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The data is pretty overwhelming. Scientists have looked at this problem in several different ways. They’ve examined ice core data and measured carbon dioxide levels trapped in the ice. They have drilled in the bottom of lakes to investigate the sediment, and they’ve also used several other techniques.

The data all points in one direction. Carbon dioxide levels have risen in the last 50,000 to 100,000 years. Specifically, carbon dioxide levels have increased dramatically over the past 200 years (the industrial age) to levels never seen in tens of thousands of years.

One could easily argue that you don’t need to be a scientist to know that our climate is changing. The wildfires in the West are more potent, more extensive, and more frequent than ever. We have seen more catastrophic flooding throughout the US. This is not the flooding we see every spring along the Mississippi River. Instead, we’ve seen flooding in St. Louis, Eastern Kentucky, parts of West Virginia, the Las Vegas Valley, and Dallas. Dallas?!? Dallas, Texas, received 12 to 14 inches of rain over six hours in August. Usually, Dallas will see 1 to 3 inches of rain for the whole month of August. This is abnormal.

We have two choices: we can sit back and blame drought, flooding, tornadoes, intense hurricanes, melting glaciers, and more ferocious snowstorms on the vagaries of mother nature. Or we can decide to do something to put our planet back in balance.

What can we do?

First, we stop doing the damage: we have to reduce carbon emissions which cause the greenhouse gases that heat the atmosphere. Second, we have to actively try to reverse the damage we’ve done, including by making changes in how we live, how we rebuild our infrastructure, and how we plan for the future. For our society to thrive, we need a stable environment. It is that simple.

The Press

For our system of government to work, we need an informed electorate. We need the press. Unfortunately, the press hasn’t worked for us for several years or decades. The press has made catastrophic failures, some of which should have led to self-reflection and reckoning. However, more recent failures have led to—nothing.

In my lifetime, the biggest failure of the press has got to be the Iraq War. As you recall, the Bush administration trotted out a series of explanations of why Iraq was an immediate threat to the United States. We were told that Iraq was building a nuclear weapon and would have one soon. We were told Iraq also had these mobile biologic weapons that could be used against us and our allies at any time. And, of course, Iraq had formed a deadly alliance with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. All these stories came from the Bush Administration. But …

None of these things was true. Let that sink in. None of these things was true.

Yet the mainstream media raked in whatever the Bush administration said and happily spewed out vast chunks of these lies to the American public. The lies had devastating consequences on the Iraqi people. We invaded Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people died. The country was virtually destroyed.

Yet the press corps paid little or no penalty for their failures. New York Times reporter Judith Miller, one of the biggest supporters of the Iraq war, who was supposed to be an expert in chemical and biological weapons, was cast out into the wilderness (fired from The Times).

That’s because her “reporting” was flat-out wrong. All she did was parrot whatever her valuable (overvalued) “insider sources” in the Administration told her. Yet The New York Times, which was supposed to fact-check her articles, did nothing. They paid no price. After years of front-page articles touting the unjustified war, dismissing the deaths and maiming of Iraqis, there was no extensive front-page article in The Times explaining how they screwed up and how they would correct their mistakes.

The biggest problem with the press is that its primary mission is no longer to inform the public properly. Instead, their mission is to make money for their parent corporations. As a result, the quality of news has taken a back seat. What matters is not real news, but stories that generate clicks. It is more critical for them to keep you on their website, scrolling endlessly. The longer you stay and click, the more money you generate for their parent company.

Let’s look at the latest overhyped nonsense that the press is shoveling at us—the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago for government documents. By now, everybody knows the story. It’s impossible to miss it. It has been on the front page of every paper and the headline story on every news channel since it took place on August 8.

The essence of the story has not changed. The Department of Justice, for more than a year, has been trying to get documents from former President Donald Trump. These documents belong in the national archives and not in Donald Trump’s summer retreat, Mar-a-Lago. That’s the story. Yes, there are some classified and top-secret documents. Just about everything else that has been written about the story is speculation. We have no idea exactly what was in those documents. We have no idea why some of the papers are top secret. We have no idea why Trump took them from the White House or what he planned on doing with these documents.

But to generate more clicks, the press needs to hype this story. Therefore, the taking of these documents must be painted as the most egregious act that a former president has ever committed. This act is going to lead to the incarceration of Donald Trump. This causes the Left to celebrate. This causes the Right to lash out in anger. It causes both the Left and the Right to watch more news, click on more news sites, and generate more money for these news corporations.

This is just another example of Donald Trump breaking the law. He had done this numerous times in office and before he was elected. I’m unsure how this is worse than diplomats staying at the Trump Hotel in Washington, DC, or Trump trying to strong-arm Ukraine into investigating Joe and Hunter Biden. Will this lead to indictments? Will this lead to Trump going to jail? I doubt it. It may happen, but I doubt it.

Until we can fix the media, our democracy will continue to flounder. We must find a way to dial down the rhetoric. We must take the money out of the media.

Limits used to exist on the cross-ownership of media. Before Ronald Reagan, no corporation could own more than one television station and one radio station in a market or own both broadcast media and newspapers in one city. An equal time rule required a station or network to honestly present both, or all, sides of a story instead of only promoting their favorite politicians.

Maybe we need to return to those rules: no media corporation can own more than one newspaper, radio station, or television station in a market. Maybe, no corporation can own more than five local papers, each in a different market? Maybe a cable or broadcast network should lose its license if it airs lies and refuses to correct them—publicly, on air.

The one thing we must do is remove political campaign ads from television. This is one way the media generates a ridiculous amount of money. Not one of these campaign ads does anything to strengthen our democracy. If anything, it probably weakens our democracy. This is one of our problems that must be solved.

A Couple of Things…

President Biden gave a primetime address in which he pled for our democracy. He pointed out that some MAGA Republicans were anti-American and anti-democratic. I will go one step further and state that MAGA Republicans would not exist without the strong support of right-wing media. It is the right-wing media who keep these MAGA Republicans in a fervor.

Serena Williams lost in the third round of the US Open. She has announced her retirement from tennis. She was simply one of the most fun, engaging, competitive, relentless, athletic tennis players (male or female) who ever played the game. I will miss seeing her on the court.

The United States economy added 315,000 jobs in August. You cannot have a recession with a strong jobs market. Wages increased 5.2% over the last year. Our economy is getting better.

Mary Peltola, an Alaska native and Democrat, beat Sarah Palin in a runoff election for Alaska’s lone House seat. Unfortunately, this victory is going to be short-lived. She has to run again in November for this very same seat.

The Ukrainian war may hinge on Germany’s ability to live without Russia’s natural gas. Germany is trying to store natural gas for the winter and ramp up other energy sources.

As we think about our country’s problems, we must keep healthcare at the forefront.

The new bivalent Covid vaccine became available early in September. It should protect us against the original Covid 19 virus and the omicron variant. I will be first in line with my sleeves rolled up.

Jackson, Mississippi, the capitol of the state, is without drinkable water. Devastating flooding has crippled its water treatment plant. City water is not fit to drink. People are getting by on bottled water and boiling water. This shouldn’t happen in the United States. This is a problem that has been festering for decades. It’s an excellent example of how a known problem was not solved and now people are paying the price.

Shouldn’t we band together and fix problems before they become a crisis? Sometimes something is simple without being easy. It’s simple to know you need a new bridge, and plan it, and allocate funds for it. It’s simple, but it’s not easy: you have to acquire land, right of way, funding, and then do the actual construction. Those can be complicated tasks. So simple doesn’t mean easy, and many of the problems we face aren’t easy.

But the solution is simple: identify the problem; face it; make a plan; fix it!

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed here, as well as assertions of facts, are those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of The Urban News.