Black Hearts, White Noise
The “tomorrow problem” has shoved the fate of life on Earth to the back burner.
The attacks of 9/11 were met with the same limitless attention, dominating the news in every corner of the world. Unspeakable calamity demands unstinting reporting and gets it. World War I. The Great Depression. Pearl Harbor. The Holocaust. Hiroshima. These were, after all, some of the century’s most historic and cataclysmic events studied ad infinitum. The Communist Revolution. The partition of India and Pakistan. McCarthyism. The Cultural Revolution. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Watts riots. The Kennedy assassination. The MLK assassination. The Killing Fields. Apartheid. Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. The January 6 MAGA insurrection. Together they were subjected to a volume of journalistic attention that is simultaneously obvious and mind boggling.
They were nothing.
Oh, certainly the tragedy and horror and danger and blood and fear and impact of these events was all too real, and often deadly at a scale that is also difficult to comprehend. But everything is relative. And if we’re talking about the story of the century, the story of the millennium, the story of all of human history to date — a story that renders Pearl Harbor and the rest small potatoes — please know that it is none of the above. Not. Even. Close.
And we are in the middle of it right now. Thing is, if you stop what you’re doing, and go to the homepage of your five favorite media sources, you will most likely not see a mention of it. Gabby Petito (as noted on my last Bully Pulpit episode), for sure. But the biggest story ever? Not a word. Not a peep.
The story is the destruction of Planet Earth, well under way. The fate of 8 billion and their unborn heirs hangs in the balance. For every single one of them — of us — life will change for the worse. As it already has.