The time to panic is now!

For the past few months, I've been reading about, thinking about and worrying about the horribly dismal state of the world today and towards where it is headed. Let me try and summarise some of the things that are happening all around us at this very moment:
Human confidence around the world seems to be plummeting to an all time low. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become such humanitarian nightmares that no one seems to know how to clean resolve. Despite the spread of the much touted US style capitalism and democracy further and wider than at any other time in history, the number of people who do not have access to the bare minimum amount of food has risen glaringly to nearly 1 billion, or almost one sixth of the world population. Global warming is creating freak weather systems all over the place - we've all experienced it. Delhi just had an amazing summer without the normal 'loo' winds that normally sear the flesh, the ice caps are melting faster, the frequency of hurricanes and typhoons has grown up to an unprecedented level, sudden floods in some parts and droughts in others, fishermen returning home with smaller and smaller catches. The world also seems to have reached peak production on its fuel of choice with consumption outstripping new discoveries. Oil prices have fluctuated from highs of around $140 to $67 a barrel in the past few months. Food prices have gone berserk in the past couple of years. Grain, once so plentiful it was often left to rot in piles on the ground, is suddenly in short supply, driving feed and food prices through the roof. The fertilizers and chemicals needed to maintain high grain production are in short supply and prices are at record levels. In the US, foreclosing on people’s homes and anti depression medication have become the only remaining growth industries.
So what's wrong with this picture? To me the obvious and glaring problem is the complete absence of panic for the right reasons that I see all around me! Instead of worrying a great deal as one united planet about some of the things that I have just mentioned, what are people around the world worrying about? All the usual stuff, business as usual. How we should save the financial services sector or help bankers save their bonuses; why Sarah Palin would blow up $150,000 of the Republican campaign budget on her wardrobe; whether the Congress party in India was clandestinely responsible for inciting Raj Thackeray as a political tool against the Shiv Sena; how Christianity or Islam would one day convert / wipe out all other religions so that only those who accepted the one true Trinity / God were left on the planet; about sending machines to the moon, building nuclear weapons or stopping others from doing so etc etc ad nauseum! People need to realise that these are not the important concerns of the world anymore and leave them immediately. It doesn’t really matter whether the US leaves Iraq in 6 months of 6 years because it’s not a subject worth wasting precious time and effort on. Right now, it’s time for all mankind to come together and fight the common enemies – those that have the capability to threaten our very existence as a species.
And that is why I believe that the time to panic has come. There are times when a cool head and a calm approach are exactly what are needed. For example, when financial mayhem strikes global financial markets, the last thing we should to do to try and fix things is to panic the public and cause a run on banks! But this is different. This time I believe panic is just what we need to break out of all the denial, wishful thinking, inertia, media spin and political cowardliness. I think that public panic is the only thing left that has a small chance to shake things up and get those who need to worried enough to finally get off their comfortable backsides and start thinking of solutions as if their lives and all of ours depended on it.

The damage that mankind has done to the amazing gift that is our planet in the past 100 years or so is so completely criminal as to be almost mythical in its scope and scale of rape and pillage of the Earth’s resources. And I believe that it's reaching an inflection point in history. Unless we can think of some very, very fast and furious global manner in which to sit down and talk to one another about what we are going to do about the future, we are going to leave behind such a terrible world for our future generations that they will rightfully have nothing but hate for us.
I believe that we are heading at an alarming speed towards the most jarring social, financial and ecological calamity of the past 700 odd years. Nothing like what's coming has happened since the killer plague raged across Europe in the mid-1300's, annihilating one out of three human beings there and very nearly succeeding in pushing Europe back into the dark ages.
Yes, in my opinion, what we’re about to face is that serious and it's that frightening. Human beings have all become immune to showing consideration for the sustainability of this wonderful planet which has made life possible and fed us, bred us and allowed our species to flourish over the millennia. Instead, we've become addicts of the quick, the easy, the cheapest and the short-term fixes. That's because short-term fixes are great at addressing immediate problems, despite the often obvious finite nature of the resources required and the negative impacts such quick fixes almost always produce as byproducts.
However, I believe that there is a silver lining and, ironically I see it as a byproduct of the current global financial crisis. For the first time in recent history, something has happened to shake up the rich and the super rich of our world! All other crises that have occurred around the world in the past have mainly affected the poor and the disenfranchised - the rich were always insulated by what they could buy and their trappings of wealth. But this time they have been directly hit. The whole gigantic financial castle in the air that had been created over the past few deregulated years has suddenly dissipated into the stratosphere, leaving behind very little to show for it other than the amazingly creative brains of those same super rich people. And we all know that they are bright enough to realise that this time, when the doo-doo hits the fan, no one will be left untouched, not even them.
So I believe (and fervently hope) that it’s now time to panic. It’s now time for those same geniuses, who until now have used their colossal cumulative mental faculties to create immensely complex abstractions in the form of intricate financial products and services, to join the rest of us and start thinking about some of the more important issues concerning the world we live in. And I believe that they will, for if they do not, we and all living and non-living things on this planet are forever doomed.
Please read this woman if any of you are by now thinking that I am either hyper reacting or have started going completely unhinged or if you still believe that things will all be back to normal once the markets settle down: http://www.vandanashiva.org/ and an interview with her at http://www.alternet.org/environment/85433/