Swine Influenzas

It seems almost too perfect to have swine flu be the pandemic fear of the hour. We have, after all, been dealing with economic swine flu for the better part of two years now. Debt and speculation ruled the global roost from 2002-2007. The speculative fever that gripped the world moved like a virus. Almost all were infected, and nearly all suffer some symptoms now. Our modern, high speed, borderless economy transmitted speculative fever amongst an unending chorus of media hype. A certain piggish -- if understandable -- desire for fast and large returns gripped billions. Swine Flu develops as an affliction usually confined to pigs jumps to human populations. That sounds a little too similar to the worst excesses of the financial crisis. A feverish daze blinded many regulators and presumed voices of reason. As this goes to press the World Health Organization (WHO) is placing states and publics on the highest alert level in recent memory. A/H1N1 flu is feared to be racing around the globe from its origins in North America. Again, a certain similarity is hard to ignore. However, like the financial crisis, this is global and could emerge from any corner of the globe.

Sure, this is an analogy of convenience. However, the parallels seem both real and interesting. The co-mingling of various strains of the virus seems to have morphed into a seriously dangerous, polymorphous blight. The hap hazard tapestry of loans, credits, counter parties and shared risks in the global financial system acted similarly across the last few years. We are all linked together through trade, finance, germs and travels. The many and massive holes in our health care and epidemiological nets have allowed the nasty little germ to travel with us. The virus is able to employ our rapid travel and social needs to spread and fester. Likewise, the greed and global hunt for fast profits played on social needs. The debt and speculation virus struck first among the most vulnerable, sub-prime borrowers. The slow response and hope to quarantine losses to weak borrowers allowed the problems to spread without intervention. The low attention to Swine Flu when it was only reported in Mexico seems eerily similar.

We must now work together, using the central authority of the state, to combat the virus through public education, pronouncement and action. The virus, like the global downturn, touches us all and only together can we solve the problem. The size, nature and speed of government reaction will determine how bad this gets. Fortunately, we have national and international agencies that are jumping into action to coordinate and alert us. Unfortunately, we have nearly 50 million people left out of our health care system. The virus, like the economic crisis, exposes the collective risk arising from irresponsible treatment of the least among us.

Poor Mexico, reeling from the economic pandemic, is now mistreated to the viral version. Just like in the economic swine flu case, we see the best and worst of people and governments in the response. Perhaps the clearest lesson in both cases is the importance of rational, considered and cooperative action.

Comments

[shylove2]

Our eco-economic world demands a wholistic view in terms of environment as well as understanding all people and cultural points of view and our mutual impacts rather than projecting national interests in a selfish manner. Nationalism is a defensive, territorial, dominance oriented instinctive system base on self-preservation instincts that is not consistent with a wholistic unitary system. It has been a major factor in western civilization as a merging of military, merchant, and missionary interests in dominating, raping and pillaging our world. Today we need to start seeing from a yin-yang eastern wholistic view without suppressing the individual too much,,,,

A merging of East and West where even the East has to look back at it's root and give up some of the westernization it has acquired

[shylove2]

Good comparison. This is now more than ever a globally interdependent world. As in health it demands National Healthcare where the first priority is healthcare not profit and evading coverage and so adversely impacting everyone's health. So also allowing profit to be a first priority to the detriment of everyone else is detrimental to our economic health.

Just so, allowing our world to exist as one of ultra-rich and ultra-poor is a self defeating economic model. The Bhutanese idea of Gross National Happiness is a much better one, producing a living environment that is not manipulative and profiting off of someone else's loss but encouraging a general good and wellbeing.

This is social responsibility and it is a recognition that we are all interdependent on this tiny jewel of life called Earth and if we cannot learn to live on it with our body and minds in balance, our instincts and our concepts, our empathy and compassion for others mixed with our ideas and actions then we will be the cause of our own extinction, a race that couldn't coordinate its body and mind in a wholistic self-sustaining way.

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