What our current crises expose about our future

Written by Jane Chan

As I observe the world go up in flames from the vantage of my window on the 12th floor, I have had plenty of time for reflection. All this has yielded one singular conclusion: we are stranded in dire straits. 

Hearing the daily reel of news about fires in streets, police assaults on civilians, and the virus, I have some questions. How can two people sharing the same flag, sharing the same language, politicize something as apolitical as a pathogen? How can two people sharing the same flag, sharing the same language, be so opposed: one setting fire to our street demanding democracy, as the other stubbornly legitimizes the abuses of an authoritarian government?

Graduating from a class robbed of a senior year since the beginning of February, I will have only attended about half a year’s worth of school - the result of the protests that have ripped through the streets of Hong Kong, and the virus, which has shuttered the school I spent the last decade growing up in. 

Students in Hong Kong turned out in massive waves, scared and anxious about the future of Hong Kong, yet I watched as governments turned a blind eye to it all. Unwilling to compromise, unwilling to even engage.

As Wuhan authorities broadcast, with blaring alarm bells, the perils of strained resources and an invisible disease, America, an ocean away, paid no heed. Its President looked on with aloof carelessness, selfishly tuning in only to the songs of praise from governors amid the 2020 election year. It was only until it was too late, did he backtrack on his cries of ‘hoaxes’ and the demonic ‘dems,’ like a petulant child slapped on the wrist by his teacher, immunologist Anthony Fauci.

All the while, the news media has plastered the virus across all their headlines, with different channels dramatizing different views, further polarizing this world. Take one example. The Hong Kong protests have been labelled by the New York Times as ‘The One United Struggle for Freedom.’ In the South China Morning Post, they were implicitly described as “xenophobic.” Being a US-HK dual citizen, I sat in the first row, observing how torn people had become, and how government officials from the States, HK, and even China, are obtuse, ignorant, and stubborn. 

I foresee two issues. 

The first revolves around the global balance of power. Unlike the States, the upcoming, global hegemon does not force its values upon other nations in exchange for economic aid. It, purportedly, has little interest in seeing the spread of authoritarianism past its borders, barring Hong Kong and Taiwan, and merely seeks money and trade from partners. Its model of economic coercion works exceedingly well, as it laps up friends in Africa and Europe, displacing America from its reigning status under its self-proclaimed mandate of heaven.

This, in and of itself, has already been accepted by a proportion of Americans. However, what concerns me is the fact that President Trump is letting it happen without a fight, accelerating the decline of American power. As the world seeks to appease China in its attempts to accrue stocks of Chinese-manufactured ventilators, N-95 masks, it directly undermines the core values of Western democracy: human decency, freedom of speech, and the self-evident truth, that all are created equal. It directly undermines its criticism of China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and its extraterritorial desires in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The admiration countries hold in the hope of overcoming the virus leads them to gloss over the abuses of authoritarianism. 

All the while, Trump plays a game of childish ego-boosting, offering ‘large sums of money’ to purchase a German vaccine ‘only for the United States’, aggravating the European bloc which had, in contrast, received 200,000 advanced masks and 50,000 testing kits from China. From the heights of leading the world into the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the US has reached a new low. 

In the words of John Donne, “no man is an island...” except the United States after competing with allies for supplies that should have been stockpiled.

The lack of US leadership directly provides for China’s model of authoritarianism to rise. Though I don’t contest the benefits of the Chinese government in nurturing their own version of the American Dream, I would be sufficiently scared to see foreign democracies use this as an excuse to don the shackles of autocracy. It is evident that Trump’s incompetence on the global stage at this time of crisis has led to a vast improvement of China’s reputation on the world stage.

The second issue, however, revolves around what these crises reveal about the human psyche. It’s undeniable that the WHO, the US, Europe, have acted too late against a pandemic viewed as foreign, far away, and an issue to be dealt with later. On the flip side, the urgency of the cries for liberation and freedom in Hong Kong has reached a fever pitch, as the sudden erosion of our courts has been immediately threatened by the Extradition Bill. Why don’t we have the same sense of anxiety over climate change? Or antibiotic resistance? Or depleting oil reserves?

Evident is a concerning pattern of procrastination; the most urgent issues cloud everyone’s judgement of future calamities. 

World leaders are blinded by the issues of now, instead of the issues of later.

In the case of the West, it is the virus and their laughable attempt to prepare against it. In the case of the world, it is the future of inevitable, disastrous catastrophes. Whether it be groundwater shortages, natural disasters amped up on steroids, or antibiotic resistance, a plethora of issues plagues world governments who operate on the short-term.

What it all makes clear is that the world is inadequately prepared for the future. 

Welcome to the new decade.