just curious: how successful can we be at “making sure this doesn’t happen again” when we, as a society, don’t even understand in general how security risks come about or are mitigated? if all of the prevention measures we have now for “preventing terrorists from hijacking planes” for instance, had been proposed on, on let’s say September 2nd 2001, it would have certainly been rejected for being too inconvenient, too costly, and too unlikely. i’m fairly certain we are a reactive society, in that we don’t really have a good imagination for bad possibilities until we see it happen, and then we focus on what would have prevented THAT...we don’t suddenly become better at imagining the next thing. people have been warning about a virus outbreak, and American lack of preparedness, for at least a decade. and yet here we are reactive instead of proactive yet again.
i predict that we will be caught off-guard by the next thing, too, even as we wear our masks and take our shots and give that extra long search to those Sikhs in airports “randomly” and add Patriot-style acts to our laws.
Haha thanks for the dose of pessimism! I think you're right though. I enjoyed the article because I think it's important to appreciate the things that are going well, such as increasing compliance with wearing masks and the record speed of the vaccine production, but if the next big thing is a comet or super volcano or anything other than a very similar coronavirus outbreak we're going to be starting from square one all over again.
just curious: how successful can we be at “making sure this doesn’t happen again” when we, as a society, don’t even understand in general how security risks come about or are mitigated? if all of the prevention measures we have now for “preventing terrorists from hijacking planes” for instance, had been proposed on, on let’s say September 2nd 2001, it would have certainly been rejected for being too inconvenient, too costly, and too unlikely. i’m fairly certain we are a reactive society, in that we don’t really have a good imagination for bad possibilities until we see it happen, and then we focus on what would have prevented THAT...we don’t suddenly become better at imagining the next thing. people have been warning about a virus outbreak, and American lack of preparedness, for at least a decade. and yet here we are reactive instead of proactive yet again.
i predict that we will be caught off-guard by the next thing, too, even as we wear our masks and take our shots and give that extra long search to those Sikhs in airports “randomly” and add Patriot-style acts to our laws.
Haha thanks for the dose of pessimism! I think you're right though. I enjoyed the article because I think it's important to appreciate the things that are going well, such as increasing compliance with wearing masks and the record speed of the vaccine production, but if the next big thing is a comet or super volcano or anything other than a very similar coronavirus outbreak we're going to be starting from square one all over again.
This is the best news I've read since March...
Very refreshing to read. Thanks for posting!
agreed.