We just can’t keep this up. Indeed, we are now at a point where we need to prioritize which crisis we care about most.
We had put climate change on hold a bit when we were dealing with Covid and once we got through that we thought we’d take a breather, but we were immediately plunged into the inhumanity of Ukraine and the prospect of actual nuclear war.
It was one thing dealing with new crises, but now it felt like the crises from our childhood were coming back to haunt us.
We thought inflation was going to be the main crisis when we got out of Covid. Then we briefly put that aside along with climate change while we faced Ukraine. But then it turned out that there was intersectionality between all the crises.
So Ukraine took inflation and made it worse, and Ukraine didn’t help with the climate crisis either because we were basically thinking of going back to coal and steam power to meet our energy needs.
We couldn’t face Ukraine, inflation and climate change at the same time, so we decided to completely ignore climate change and swallow some more inflation to do the right thing for Ukraine.
But we had to balance our economies against man’s inhumanity to man. So for now we’re still giving the Russians three quarters of a billion a day for fossil fuels. Oh yes, one more thing, we agreed that we would think about possible food shortages later.
You will find that with all this juggling we had completely written off the Covid. We just didn’t have the extra bandwidth for a pandemic. But unfortunately it had the bandwidth for us and suddenly the whole country had Covid. We ignored that for as long as possible until the healthcare system collapsed.
We absolutely couldn’t put Covid back at the top of the list, so we basically reworded it as great and started to suggest that maybe we shouldn’t make such a fuss about people staying home just because they have Covid . Sure, wasn’t it a sign of pride to go to work coughing and spluttering back in the day?
The Tánaiste appeared to be pioneering this new easy-going approach when he appeared on TV on Thursday sounding and looking like someone battling a cold before giving in to a positive antigen test on Friday.
To do him justice, he tried to distract us from all the crises by throwing out wheezes like a new tax rate and spat on Michael Healy-Rae. But it didn’t feel like we had our usual appetite for silly distractions last week. When we got to host the Euros it didn’t really get us going because we and the UK were the only real democracies in the running. Little did we know that Russia threw their hat back in the ring.
The truth is, at least some of these crises could be with us for a while. So, like Covid, we have to learn to live with them. Just because we stop obsessing over them doesn’t mean we don’t care.
But one thing is for sure. We can’t go on like this.
