It’s a 50-50 world

For many things, the people of the world are about evenly split. Every four years we have a presidential election, and the popular vote is usually decided by less than one percent. A 51% to 49% outcome is considered a landslide. About half the population thinks that global warming will wipe out our grandchildren in the year 2100, and the other half thinks it’s a hoax. And the same 50-50 split probably applies to a great many other major issues; after all, they wouldn’t be issues if there weren’t two sides.

This is probably a feature and not a bug. If one side had a clear majority, then that side would win 100% of the time. Instead, there is either a back-and-forth swing from one side to the other, or a stalemate between the two sides. As an electorate, we tend to alternate parties every eight years in presidential elections. In the global warming debate, neither side can gain a clear majority and bend the other side to their will.

What’s my point? The cautious half of the population have, rightly, dominated the COVID-19 debate for the past month or so and have successfully shut down the entire world. Congratulations, fearful, you have achieved an unprecedented result. But this situation is not tenable and now, as so often happens in the back-and-forth struggle between two evenly matched sides, we have reached the point for the less fearful among us to assert themselves and turn the world back on again.

Carl Shaw

Coeur d’Alene