AFS Cinema
The Big Picture
RECEIVED Mon., May 4, 2020
Dear Editor,
Thank you for the important article about data storing, pollution, and the climate emergency that is all but forgotten during this pandemic [“We Can’t Let Coronavirus Distract Us From Data Collection and Climate Change,” Opinion, May 1]. Modern institutions are horrible when it comes to anybody observing the “big picture.” Why has the response to the coronavirus pandemic been terrible in the U.S. while other countries did fair to very well? We reached more COVID-19 deaths than the annual death rate from the opioid epidemic – however, the highly contagious opioid use disorder is cheaply treatable, with methadone, in milder cases buprenorphine combined with targeted psychotherapies (these medication assisted treatments work like nicotine patches, greatly decreasing craving while hardly interfering with normal functioning and emotions). But governments and our profit-driven health care system have been sabotaging these treatments!
Regarding the data gathering-storing: Why do we allow it? The data is mostly valuable because data analysis can effectively influence people to vote for pro-business politicians and to buy things they do not need and cannot afford. Their damage to climate change is threefold: vast electricity use, promoting products that do not increase people's quality of life, and political shifts resulting in the disregard of the climate emergency.
Apparently, climate change is progressing much faster than predicted: We need quick, radical changes in our economic institutions. Diets must become mostly vegan. Our transportation systems need trains, high-speed to narrow track light-rail, reaching all neighborhoods and settlements, and ultra-light human-powered and electric vehicles, with and without bodies, largely based on bicycle technologies. And we must ensure world wide access to family planning.
Lastly, we must acknowledge that consumerism and addiction to wealth and power are psychiatric disorders. We must fight them. And education on all levels must seek to better teach ethics in the broadest sense of the word.
Thank you for the important article about data storing, pollution, and the climate emergency that is all but forgotten during this pandemic [“We Can’t Let Coronavirus Distract Us From Data Collection and Climate Change,” Opinion, May 1]. Modern institutions are horrible when it comes to anybody observing the “big picture.” Why has the response to the coronavirus pandemic been terrible in the U.S. while other countries did fair to very well? We reached more COVID-19 deaths than the annual death rate from the opioid epidemic – however, the highly contagious opioid use disorder is cheaply treatable, with methadone, in milder cases buprenorphine combined with targeted psychotherapies (these medication assisted treatments work like nicotine patches, greatly decreasing craving while hardly interfering with normal functioning and emotions). But governments and our profit-driven health care system have been sabotaging these treatments!
Regarding the data gathering-storing: Why do we allow it? The data is mostly valuable because data analysis can effectively influence people to vote for pro-business politicians and to buy things they do not need and cannot afford. Their damage to climate change is threefold: vast electricity use, promoting products that do not increase people's quality of life, and political shifts resulting in the disregard of the climate emergency.
Apparently, climate change is progressing much faster than predicted: We need quick, radical changes in our economic institutions. Diets must become mostly vegan. Our transportation systems need trains, high-speed to narrow track light-rail, reaching all neighborhoods and settlements, and ultra-light human-powered and electric vehicles, with and without bodies, largely based on bicycle technologies. And we must ensure world wide access to family planning.
Lastly, we must acknowledge that consumerism and addiction to wealth and power are psychiatric disorders. We must fight them. And education on all levels must seek to better teach ethics in the broadest sense of the word.
Heinz Aeschbach, MD