The end game is the very last part of a strategic game, like chess or backgammon. It is the last few moves you make to determine the winner and loser. It’s common knowledge that grandmasters can see many moves ahead, as many as 15 to 20 moves ahead if given enough time. Their tournaments are timed to limit this brilliance. By contrast, I never learned to play the game beyond one or two moves ahead at best. As a result, I rarely won a game.
Our modern world is a giant chess game right now. There are so many pieces, and the range of movement is so great. Politics and perceptions are so far off true science-based logic that our likely demise seems almost certain. That is, unless we step back, take a timeout, and consider moves that are a bit further along in our mutual journeys than those deemed important by current politics. As just one example of this mental approach, please carefully consider this recent article about the bee populations: ‘Could become a death spiral’: scientists discover what’s driving record die-offs of US honeybees | Bees | The Guardian
The following quote summarizes the findings: “Scientists have been scrambling to discover what happened; now the culprits are emerging. A research paper published by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), though not yet peer-reviewed, has found nearly all colonies had contracted a bee virus spread by parasitic mites that appear to have developed resistance to the main chemicals used to control them.”
The simple fact is that if the world bee population collapses much further, and pollination of plants gets driven to a fraction of what it is today, the world starves. The same process is happening in our health care system with its use of disinfectants. The bad germs are mutating, gaining resistance, and resulting in the deaths of patients who were not even sick as they entered the hospital.
You may remember the movies titled War of the Worlds where our planet was saved by this process, but our current situation is far from in this hopeful state. Our planet’s microorganisms are mutating in response to our attempts to amplify the natural balance of life. Consider these comments about our health care system since COVID:
“There was a lot of unnecessary use of antibiotics during that time. And so now we see sharp increases in many of those antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Many of these germs live in the intestines. They are generally kept at bay by the good bacteria that we all have in our intestines. But sometimes, when we use antibiotics, or use devices or do surgery, those good bacteria are destroyed. And then these germs can find a hospitable niche and grow and cause infections.”
Ironically, it is our quest for efficiency, scale, and the consequent financial rewards that pushes otherwise natural balances out of balance. The only form of life that is not mutating is us, so we need to think farther ahead than winning elections and supporting near term business ideas that are simply not sustainable. There are world class energy and societal chess players who can define the sustainable world end game … and trust me, they are not the current brood of politicians or world leaders.
To them I plead: Please come forward and rescue the bees now and us from future calamities like this! We need the bee’s knees experts for sure.