Current events spark delight and dread

Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Led Zeppelin 110 years later sang, “Good times, bad times, you know I’ve had my share.”

Moments of “good news/bad news” aren’t rare, but the world is in a doozy.

Boomers like me remember the excitement of the “Space Race’ to the Moon and the anguish of race as a stain sparking the Civil Rights Movement, which became inspiring.

Times today are amazingly encouraging AND profoundly threatening.

By itself, the Senate’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act was a bright light (even clouded by the refusal of just one Senate Republican to support the bill). It’s the nation’s biggest investment in addressing climate change, and invests $360 billion in affordable clean-energy sources.

“The bill will also put downward pressure on inflation,” comments Ben Jealous, president of People for the American Way. “It may take a little while to see all the effects, but saving families money on health care, prescriptions and energy – while reducing the deficit – is a firm push in the right direction for the economy.”

Elsewhere, Kansas’ voters last month cast ballots to protect women’s right to choose with 59% of the vote – in a state that went for Trump 56.1% in 2020 and 56.2% in 2016.

Back in Washington, President Biden has surprisingly delivered on an astounding number of achievements, from improvements to health care coverage to successfully appointing 75 judges as of last month, to a massive measure to combat climate change.

Also within that legislation are price caps on insulin, and empowering Medicare to negotiate lower rates for prescription drugs. Don’t overlook the $550 billion infrastructure program; creating semiconductor production in the “Chips Act”; passing a burn-pits act; finishing the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan; ushering through an anti-Asian hate-crimes bill, an anti-lynching bill and updates to the Violence against Women Act – as well as building on COVID relief.

In less than two years, Biden compares favorably with familiar initiatives by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan – two Democrats and two Republicans.

Plus, Biden’s done this with a sense of savvy and decency absent in recent years.

“He has restored transparency and integrity to the White House and Department of Justice, while expanding diversity throughout the executive branch,” comments Thomas Oakes, a retired University of Chicago financial analyst. “He significantly reduced the federal budget deficit, addressed gas price-gouging, required publicly traded corporations to pay a modest 1% excise tax on stock buybacks and assured corporations with over $1 billion in earnings will pay a minimum 15% income tax.”

That isn’t isn’t close to corporations’ 1950s effective tax rate of 52%, but at least once more big and profitable corporations will share the costs of society – a big step.

Yes, the 117^th Congress has sometimes functioned, even if some actions were “winning ugly,” as the Division-winning White Sox said in 1983.

None of the new laws is perfect, but incremental progress IS progress.

Unlike the Inflation Reduction Act and ongoing threats to democratic norms, there was occasional bipartisanship, too: in the infrastructure package, postal reforms, a gun-safety law and support for Ukraine.

Therein is the dreadful turn.

For all the legitimate concern with climate change and alarm at the jeopardy Russia’s invasion of its sovereign neighbor has placed on the Zaporizhzia nuclear power plant in southeast Ukraine, the danger of nuclear war has increased to a point not seen for 60 years.

At June’s meeting in Vienna of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons group, delegates adopted a statement expressing concern about “threats to use nuclear weapons and increasingly strident nuclear rhetoric.” The state officials condemned “any and all nuclear threats, whether they be explicit or implicit and irrespective of the circumstances,” and the use “as instruments of policy, linked to coercion, intimidation and heightening of tensions.”

Weeks later, an international study from Rutgers University warned that even a “limited” nuclear war would cause billions of deaths.

“Any use of nuclear weapons could be a catastrophe for the world,” said study author Alan Robock, a professor in Rutgers’ Department of Environmental Sciences. The study “shows you can’t use nuclear weapons. If you use them, you’re like a suicide bomber. You’re trying to attack somebody else but you’ll die of starvation.”

The United States and Russia together hold 90% of the world’s nuclear arms; nine other countries have the rest. A large exchange of nuclear weapons would kill three-fourths of the planet’s population through blasts, firestorms and radiation, as well as “nuclear winter” from sun-blocking soot in the atmosphere and resulting famine, shows the study, published Aug. 15 in the journal Nature Food. War using merely 3% of the world’s nukes would kill one-third of Earth’s inhabitants.

For example, in an India-Pakistan nuclear conflict attacking their cities with a couple hundred 100-kiloton nuclear weapons, some 127 million people there would die from explosions, fires and radiation, according to the study. About 37 million metric tons of soot would be spewed into the air, sending temperatures throughout the world dropping by more than 41 degrees Fahrenheit, something not seen since the Ice Age. Food production would collapse, and the ensuing famine would kill another 2 billion people worldwide.

“The general public needs to understand the enormity of the danger we face, the immediacy of the threat and the urgency of eliminating these weapons before they eliminate us,” comments Ira Helfand from the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

The idea that the Cold War never resorted to using nukes because both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. knew they’d both be destroyed– “Mutual Assured Destruction” was the concept – no longer applies, comments economist Thomas Paley, author of last year’s “Plenty of Nothing: The Downsizing of the American Dream.”

The reason nuclear war never happened, he says, is because nuclear weapons were linked to U.S.-U.S.S.R. conventional weapons parity in the area where they were in direct conflict, Europe.

“But now, the U.S. has overwhelming superiority in conventional weapons ,” Palley says.

Therefore, in fighting like that in Ukraine, “Russia could face an unacceptable conventional war defeat, at which stage it would turn to use of tactical nuclear weapons to head off that outcome,” he continues. “The stakes are too high for silence.”

 

It’s a woeful, wonderful time of terror and hope.

I miss the terrible, tumultuous ’60s.