In 2014, former President Clinton said in a Jimmy Kimmel interview that “[an alien invasion from outer space] may be the only way to unite this increasingly divided world of ours.”
More than two decades earlier, in 1987, President Reagan had said “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside of this world” — in other words, if we humans were facing a global existential threat.
And now we are facing not one, but two of them simultaneously: climate change and the coronavirus pandemic. Such much for simple solutions.
In trying to understand the causes and our failure to solve both the climate crisis and the pandemic, especially if we’re apparently not going to intuitively drop our differences and unite against our common enemies, it would be well to remember the warning from the early days of the environmental movement: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
It’s time to come together to face the twin global existential threats facing us and start changing our behaviors. If now is not that time, then when on earth is?
Al Forsyth, River Heights
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