If you pull way back and take the historical perspective, a lot of stories, aren’t.
I stand second to few in my abhorrence of the Israeli project to ethnic cleanse and genocide Palestine, but it’s been ongoing for a long time and involves about five million Palestinians plus various supporters of genocide and people trying to stop genocide. It’s moving towards the end-game, as Israel loses deterrence because of its military’s sheer incompetence and changing military technology, but it’s playing out more or less as expected: the tiny colonial enclave surrounded by hostile natives is in decline as its super power sponsor is in decline.
The Ukraine war is important because it’s another indicator of the end of the American century and Western hegemony and the first major war which shows how new battlefield tech works in practice. But, pull back a bit and well, it’s just a sign of something inevitable, which is the end of Western hegemony. And that was signed when the US decided to send its industry to China: the actual decision was made back in the 90s.
US internal political shenanigans, like Texas illegally defying the Federal government over immigration and attempts to keep Trump off the ballot and so on are important: but they’re just the logical consequence of American economic decline and of neo-liberal ideology. Don’t decide to become a plutocratic oligarchy by electing Reagan, and none of this happens. Again, the decision was made a long time ago, but also, whatever, the US was never going to be number 1 forever.
The rise of China is also a sort of semi-story. The place that was the technological and economic leader for most of the last 2,000 years is regaining is prominence after a period of decline caused by an unevenly spread technological renaissance. This isn’t a surprise, it’s almost an inevitability. though when and how it happens matters to those of us around when it does.
But Covid is a real story. It’s probably a black plague level story. A virus that badly damages immune systems and which leaves many people crippled but alive. That matters, because it’s changing the cycles. Empires rise and fall, tech breakthroughs happen, are clustered and give an advantage then disperse, and military tech changes in ways which change war, often for centuries, but major major plagues, well, they’re hardly unknown, but it’s been a while and Covid is a big one.
It’s not the deaths that matter so much. It’s the disabling. This lovely chart runs to the middle of 2023.
As for Covid, well, it’s a pandemic. That means it runs in waves.
Ain’t that something? Turns out declaring the pandemic over and the pandemic being over are two different things.
Increasing levels of people not being able to work and needing to be supported is a big, big deal, for reasons I assume are obvious.
We’ll talk more about this soon, real soon, because Covid was a test and we failed as a species, no one handled it properly even though doing so would have been fairly simple. And why we couldn’t handle Covid is why we can’t handle anything else, including the most important “story” or problem in the world.