Are you feeling a little stressed these days, especially over the news coming out of our nation’s capital?
I sure am. So, the other day I searched the headlines for something calming and Musk-free. I stumbled across an item that made our current predicament seem trivial by comparison.
Sixty-six million years ago this week, give or take a few geological sub-epochs, an asteroid six miles in diameter slammed into the Yucatan peninsula, which juts into what is now the “Gulf of America.” The impact left a crater 62 miles wide and 19 miles deep, throwing up enough dust and toxic gases to blot out the sun. Over the years, global temperatures plunged, and vegetation withered and died. Three-quarters of all living creatures on earth perished, including every single dinosaur.
We humans didn’t arrive on the scene until about 300,000 years ago, thereby avoiding extinction. In the intervening years, though, we’ve been working hard to kill ourselves off — by starting wars, burning the carbon-heavy remnants of dead dinosaurs and making our lives more difficult by choosing the wrong leaders.
It is far too early to include our new president in that last category, though he has been slamming into all sorts of things since his inauguration mere weeks ago. Assisted by the ever-president — oops, make that “ever-present” — Elon Musk, Donald Trump is essentially dismantling the federal government and selling it for parts.
That campaign includes closing entire departments, defunding others, laying off thousands of nonpartisan civil servants and replacing them with a smaller number of loyalists. He is also threatening to invade Greenland, Panama and Gaza, unilaterally renaming international bodies of water (well, one so far) and inflicting tariffs on our trading partners.
Perhaps more alarming, he is ignoring the laws and norms of American democracy while sidelining Congress, the judiciary, the press and other traditional institutions that might slow his rampage. It’s almost as if our constitutional republic, which has slumbered safely for centuries, now finds itself in the path of a one-man asteroid.
And, in a coincidence too good for even a desperate newspaper columnist to invent, a real asteroid is at this very moment bearing down on planet Earth. Sixty-six million years after the “big one,” a sizeable space rock known to astronomers as 2024 YR4 will come dangerously close to our green and pleasant sphere on Dec. 22, 2032 — toward the end of what Trump has hinted might be his third term.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 is no more than 300 feet in diameter. Still, that’s big enough to wipe out a major city, cause killer tidal waves, mess with the weather and leave a pothole even bigger than those found in the Berkshires. Astronomers have calculated the chances of an Earth impact at about one in 45, which somehow doesn’t seem terribly reassuring. After all, at the height of the COVID pandemic, the odds of an American dying from the virus were about one in 300.
Things could get even scarier. The U.S. is facing a possible bird-flu epidemic just as funding is being cut for medical research, and the Trump administration’s newly confirmed Health and Human Services chief doesn’t believe in vaccines. We’re also facing a mountain of debt at a time when the president intends to cut taxes and thus reduce revenues.
Meanwhile, labor shortages are worsening in many industries, especially agriculture, just as the president is about to start mass deportations of immigrant workers. He has declared war against clean energy and efforts to contain climate change even as global temperatures are hitting new highs. The U.S. inflation rate ticked up this week, and those new tariffs will almost surely drive it higher.
Can America survive this meteor shower? Maybe — if we stay focused, get organized, show up, support good candidates, write letters, file lawsuits when necessary and, of course, resist the temptation to tune out upsetting news.
Otherwise, there’s a small but terrifying chance that our democracy — which survived a Civil War, a Great Depression, two World Wars, a Cold War, four presidential assassinations and four impeachments — might go the way of the dinosaurs.
