Our nation’s leaders don’t do a very good job thinking long term. They focus on political battles and who wins the sound bite game.  

Over five years ago, Bill Gates warned that a global pandemic is inevitable, and he proposed a specific solution to deal with the threat.  President Trump scrapped much of the pandemic prevention work done by presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And now, more than 190,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, our economy is on its knees, we have the highest unemployment rate in years, we have spent trillions of dollars in stimulus funds that our children will have to pay back,  and we are stuck with a new, not-so-better way of life.  If we had played the long game, and had taken this threat seriously, none of this would have happened.  Good government matters, and a government that looks down the road and deals with serious issues before they deal with us is what we need. 

Significantly minimizing the risk of a pandemic through advance planning is not the only way that good government can avert a crisis and make a difference in your life.  As you are deciding who to vote for on November 3, there are at least two more urgent issues that could have massive consequences on your way of life and your children’s future.  

The first is climate change.  Burning fossil fuels over the last 120 years has raised the temperature of the planet more than 2 degrees. An increase of 2 degrees in your body temperature would put you at 100.6 and you would be sick.  This is where our planet is today.  We are sick, and because we are sick, we are seeing massive fires all over the world.  Last winter, Australia was on fire; this summer, the Brazilian rain forest. And with massive blazes burning in the San Francisco Bay area, California already has seen 2.2 million acres burned by wildfires, surpassing the state’s 2018 record. Houston, Texas suffered three 500-year floods between 2015 and 2017.  The number of global weather-related natural catastrophes has been rising steadily.  If you think COVID-19 has impacted your life, consider climate change. It will have 100X the impact on your country, your family and YOU over the next 50 years if we do nothing. 

The second big issue is the threat of a nuclear war.  As linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky said, “It’s a near miracle that nuclear war so far been avoided.”  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose Board of Sponsors includes 13 Nobel Prize recipients, has moved the Doomsday Clock from two minutes to midnight to 100 seconds before midnight.  This announcement marks the most severe security threat in the Doomsday Clock’s history, greater than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or at any time in the Cold War.  Today, the U.S. and other countries have a total of nearly 4,000 nuclear warheads deployed on missiles or at military bases around the world and another 10,000 in storage waiting to be dismantled.  We are betting that these weapons will not be used.  History would tell us that we are crazy. 

As a nation, we have a long, proud history of dealing with big problems and big opportunities.  As you make a decision on who should lead our nation and the world over the next four years, I believe it is important to ask yourself: Which candidate would do the best job of dealing with pandemics, climate change and the nuclear threat — before these issues deal with us?