[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 14 (Monday, January 25, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S127-S128]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       THE POWER OF HUMAN CHOICES

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, amid the chaos of the last 4 years, it is 
almost difficult to parse out the particular challenge that was 2020. 
Faced with deadly pandemic wrought by COVID-19 and the ensuing economic 
crisis, millions of Americans lost their jobs and found themselves in a 
newfound state of uncertainty and instability. Hundreds of thousands of 
Americans have died from the pandemic, and millions have been infected. 
Meanwhile, families across the country have lost their homes and 
businesses due to worsening hurricanes, floods, and wildfires brought 
on by intensifying climate change. And there are socioeconomic 
challenges, too, that linger and grow due to inequality, political 
division, and racial injustice, all things that have defined the last 
year.
  George Will poignantly wrote on January 1 in the Washington Post 
about the challenges we faced throughout the past year and will 
continue to face moving forward. In his piece, Mr. Will highlights a 
greater overarching challenge as well: that we, as humans, do not have 
all encompassing control over our circumstances. There are greater 
forces in play; yet our choices and decisions can dictate to some 
degree the impact of those forces.
  As we begin our work in the 117th Congress, I hope we can come 
together to better equip our families, communities, and society to 
respond to our current challenges and prepare our country to 
effectively combat similar challenges in the future.
  I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Will's column, ``2020 was a booster 
shot against human hubris,'' be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

[[Page S128]]

  


                [From the Washington Post, Jan. 1, 2021]

              2020 Was a Booster Shot Against Human Hubris

                            (By George Will)

       The plague year 2020 was yet another brutal rejoinder to 
     the belief that brute forces can be pushed to the margins of, 
     and eventually out of, humanity's experience. When today's 
     pandemic recedes, what should linger is a quickened 
     appreciation of the fragility of life and social 
     arrangements. And an awareness that things much worse than 
     covid-19 have happened before, and will continue to happen. 
     The human story is not entirely about human choices.
       The 1918-19 ``Spanish flu,'' which began in Kansas, killed 
     between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide, lowered 
     U.S. life expectancy by 12 years, and did not spare, as 
     covid-19 largely does, the young. The Black Death--the 
     bubonic plague--of 1346-1353 was much worse, killing 10 
     percent of the world's population, and more than one-third of 
     Europe's, including 40,000 of London's 70,000 residents.
       In the 1980s, AIDS was so shocking because it refuted the 
     complacent belief that infectious disease epidemics had been 
     banished. In 2019, however, 1.7 million people were newly 
     infected with the AIDS virus, and 690,000 people who were 
     already infected died. But of the 38 million living with the 
     virus, 25.4 million were controlling it with antiviral drugs.
       Astronomy lowered mankind's self-esteem (we are not the 
     center of the universe), then biology did (our species has an 
     undistinguished pedigree). Geology, too, has disturbed our 
     sense of mastery. Genesis enjoins us to ``subdue'' the Earth, 
     but this slowly cooling residue of the Big Bang gets a vote. 
     As its continents wander--half an inch to four inches a year, 
     according to plate tectonics--the planet's interior of 
     boiling gas and molten rock occasionally is heard from.
       Volcanic eruptions at what is now Yellowstone National Park 
     some 630,000 years ago covered half of what is now the 
     continental United States with ash. When the Indonesian 
     volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, sea surges, which killed 
     most of the eruption's eventual 36,000 victims, were felt in 
     the English Channel. Krakatoa, was, however, only one-tenth 
     as powerful as the April 1815 eruption of Indonesia's Mount 
     Tambora, which killed 10,000 instantly--incandescent ash 
     flowed 100 miles per hour--and generated winds that uprooted 
     trees. Particulate matter blocking the sun's rays cooled the 
     Earth: Water froze in some American cisterns on July 4. 
     Today, a large majority of the one-eighth of the nation's 
     population that lives in California resides near the San 
     Andreas fault, and the question is not if but when it will 
     lurch catastrophically.
       A U.S. satellite poised between Earth and the sun can 
     provide perhaps a 45-minute warning if the sun is going to 
     plunge the planet into darkness. On Sept. 2, 1859, before 
     there were light bulbs, a coronal mass ejection (CME) of 100 
     million tons of charged particles thrown off by the sun only 
     produced spectacular sunsets. If--actually, when--it happens 
     again, it can produce chaos in our thoroughly electrified, 
     digitized world by induced electric currents: no functioning 
     satellites, telephonic communications, water pumps, financial 
     transactions, hospitals. No Netflix. That got your attention.
       On March 13, 1989, a CME solar storm turned out the lights 
     in the entire Canadian province of Quebec. Three days 
     earlier, a NASA astronomer says, scientists had noticed ``a 
     powerful explosion on the sun. Within minutes, tangled 
     magnetic forces on the sun had released a billion-ton cloud 
     of gas. It was like the energy of thousands of nuclear bombs 
     exploding at the same time. The storm cloud rushed out from 
     the sun, straight towards Earth, at 1 million miles an 
     hour.'' This geomagnetic storm struck the Earth the evening 
     of March 12, creating ``electrical currents in the ground 
     beneath much of North America,'' crashing Quebec's power 
     grid.
       There are those who believe in a benevolent God because 
     Earth, as they see it, is ``biophilic,'' meaning friendly to 
     life. They must, however, reckon not only with non-biophilic 
     things (saber-toothed tigers, volcanoes, typhoons, viruses, 
     etc.), but also with the fact that this (meaning: everything) 
     is not going to end well. The universe will either continue 
     to expand, ending in life-extinguishing cold, or will 
     collapse into incinerating heat.
       Meanwhile, here is some (sort of) good news, from the 
     Economist. In history's bloodiest century, the last one, 100 
     million to 200 million people died as a result of war. 
     Measles killed in the same range, influenza near the top of 
     the range. Smallpox, however, killed 300 million to 500 
     million.
       The eradication of smallpox, by globally coordinated 
     vaccination campaigns, ``stands as one of the all-time-great 
     humanitarian triumphs.''
       Human choices cannot subdue all the brute forces that 
     always lurk. Choices can, however, make a difference. And 
     they can dignify us, a thinking, coping species.

                          ____________________