The Year Of The Disaster-Plex
America, we need to talk about how the multiple crises we're facing are interconnected. There are so many to choose from, and two that are probably foremost in the reader's thoughts recently, but I want to discuss five of them. (There are others. I’m not even including climate change.) Let's dub 2020 the Year of the Disaster-Plex, shall we? For many of us, the year the scales fell from our eyes. This lousy year hit us with the Covid-19 crisis first. Viruses happen, and the worst ones are the plagues: when viruses jump from other species into ours (1) . So long as we live in close proximity to animals and have less-than-perfect sanitary practices, this will keep happening from time to time. It's bound to be more common now that there are several billion of us, and we keep flying around the world in metal boxes. This one is unusually nasty because it's a stealth virus. When a plague can spread through multiple people who catch it and cough it along, without even knowi...