No turning back the clock
HUMANS are different from other animals. There is one particular factor that separates us from the bear in the wilderness, the eagle in the sky, and the shark in the ocean.
The daily life of any of these species has been virtually the same since time immemorial. While their habitats have changed—and the bear on the mountain sees distant human lights that his ancestors never experienced—life is not much different than it was a thousand generations ago.
If there is a motto that distinguishes humans from all other species, it is “Things Change.”
The giant panda is still eating the same diet it has been eating for millions of years, with low nutritional quality bamboo shoots and leaves making up 99 percent of its diet. Around 12,000 years ago humans began shifting from eating whatever they could find to
cultivating crops. Growing grains created a predictable food supply, allowing farmers’ wives to bear babies once every 2.5 years instead of one every 3.5 years for huntergatherers. Things change.
The world’s oldest wheel was discovered in Slovenia dating from 3330 BC. Dogs and goats may have been the first domesticated animals. In 800 AD, Chinese alchemists produce gunpowder while seeking an elixir of life.
But when it comes to “things change,” count the day when Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés meets with Aztec ruler Montezuma in 1519.
Edward Somerset invents the first steam engine in 1663. Edward
Jenner created the first vaccine for smallpox in 1796. Pavel Schilling invented an electromagnetic telegraph in 1832. The Suez Canal linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea opened in 1869. These events have changed the entire world forever.
If you want a starting point—and prime trigger—for the geopolitical and economic world of the past 100 years, it is June 28,1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The sequence of events that followed from the decolonization of Africa to the 2008 debt crisis emanated from that day in 1914.
There are many that think the pandemic was merely a bump in the timeline of history and soon things will return to normal. Today is the “normal.” There will never be a return to the way life was in 2019.
As the Suez Canal changed global trade forever, so also has the pandemic. No longer will we depend on China for timely delivered manufactured goods. We cannot even depend on French fries from the US.
Matthew 24:6-13: “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed.” Sorry. Things changed. Wars always disrupted trade, and economic warfare always existed. But the 21st century “inter-connectedness” of the global financial and banking system—basically controlled by the Us—changed the rules. This system will never be the same again.
The inauguration of Bongbong Marcos as the 17th Philippine president is scheduled at around noon on Thursday. Protestors will call the new president a puppet of the US (or China) as they have at every inauguration for the past 25 years. “Poverty” will take center stage like an aging beauty queen who never got the crown.
But President Marcos will lead the Philippines in a world that has never existed before. International relations have been upended for every nation. It was unthinkable that food security would now be an issue even for the US and Europe.
“To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough” is a Scots-language poem written by Robert Burns. The English translation of one verse is, “The best-laid schemes of mice and men often go wrong, and leave us nothing but grief and pain.”