THe Choice Between Hope and Hell

by the Running Girl

April 26--Much damage has already been done to the world economy and will escalate dramatically if the current occupants of Washington, Jerusalem, and London keep their hands on the tiller.

Thirty-two million people have already been pushed back into poverty; half a percent to eight-tenths of a percent of global GDP has been erased; fertilizer supply chains have been severed during planting season, with food insecurity set to peak in a matter of months, potentially to worsen significantly next year. Iran itself has lost an estimated eighteen months of human development progress in eight weeks of war. “Things that take decades to build up, it takes eight weeks of war to destroy them,” UN Development Program Administrator Alexander De Croo told Reuters this week. And in the U.S., the White House proposes to shred what remains of the American social contract—Medicare, Medicaid, childcare, “all these little scams,” in the President’s own words—so that resources can be concentrated on “military protection.”

But In the same weeks the wreckage was tallied, Memorial Sloan Kettering announced that its personalized mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer—one of the deadliest diseases known to medicine—kept nearly 90 percent of responding patients alive four to six years after treatment. India brought to criticality a 500-megawatt fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam, the product of two decades of indigenous engineering and the gateway to a thorium-fueled energy future measured in centuries, not in election cycles. These are not luxuries of a world at peace. They are the patient fruits of the assumption that human reason, applied steadily over long horizons by governments willing to back it, can solve problems that once looked insoluble. They are the antipode of a civilization at war with itself.

The choice is not between one policy and another. It is between a civilization that invests in lifting human beings out of darkness, and one that, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has put it, “vacillates between hope and Hell.”