Why the past week felt uniquely catastrophic
We could all see it coming
It's been a week.
The Taliban took over control of Afghanistan. The Caldor fire threatened Lake Tahoe. Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 4 storm and flooded the Northeast. A draconian Texas abortion law went into effect unchallenged. Florida reported record-high COVID-19 deaths. And that's only in the last seven days; no wonder we all feel so exhausted.
There have been busy news weeks before, of course: The whirlwind week of President Donald Trump's inauguration was one; the week of news breaks pertaining to the Russia probe in 2017 another; and let's not forget the dizzying week when the U.S. ground to a halt practically overnight in March 2020. But the past seven days have felt uniquely catastrophic, not due to shocking revelations or surprise turn-of-events but because we could see all of this coming.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The sense of despair was especially visible on Twitter, it being the most nihilistic of the major social media platforms. Commentary ranged from jokes about the impending apocalypse setting a hard deadline for you to actually write your book, to sincere expressions of hopelessness about the state of the world. But the sense of dread broached into real-world conversations too; last weekend, as terrible news about Afghanistan and climate change started to break, my aunt wondered aloud how young people hold it together. "I don't think we do," I said.
Experiencing this many overlapping, distressing events at one time would have been bad enough. But the fact that everything this week has been a culmination of long-foreseen disasters makes them especially heartbreaking to watch unfold. Take, for instance, the collapse of Afghanistan, which even then-Sen. Joe Biden anticipated back in 2001. "That the U.S. government could not foresee — or, perhaps, refused to admit — that beleaguered Afghan forces would continue a long-standing practice of cutting deals with the Taliban illustrates precisely the same naivete with which America has prosecuted the Afghanistan war for years," Anatol Lieven, a veteran reporter of the Afghanistan War, wrote in Politico, putting to words the way the devastation has felt nearly inevitable.
The same sense of inescapable tragedy tinges this week's weather stories. "By the time Hurricane Ida made landfall in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, on Sunday, it was the poster child for a climate change-driven disaster," The Washington Post writes, citing one atmospheric scientist who stressed that events like the storm's once-in-every-200-to-500-year rains, which caused the National Weather Service to issue its first flash flood emergency alert ever for New York City, are "exactly the kind of thing we're going to have to get used to as the planet warms." Likewise, the Sacramento Bee wrote that the Caldor Fire — which ballooned to more than eight times its size in one day and has forced thousands of Californians to evacuate — "reinforced awareness of climate change." But Hurricane Ida and the Tahoe fires don't feel so much like warnings as much as proof that the long-forewarned catastrophe of climate change is happening here and now.
Even the Texas abortion law, which was "ignored by cable news until it was too late," is a result of red-state legislatures attempting to chip away at Roe vs. Wade. Women's reproductive rights activists have been sounding the alarm for years over the potential for exactly these kinds of authoritarian laws; now it's a brutal reality for 14.6 million women living in Texas. The resurgence this week of COVID-19 deaths due to the Delta variant is another health story that feels like it should have been preventable, only for the worst-case scenario to now be playing out in Florida.
The fact that so much of what was terrible about this week was entirely foreseeable can provoke at least two reactions. The first and most understandable are despair, exhaustion, and surrender. After all, what hope is there if we're able to identify urgent problems, but not meaningfully stop them from being realized?
But another reaction might be outrage: outrage that the experts in charge were wrong, and that playing the game their way leads to people dying. Formerly discounted voices — the ones that warned all along that we should take things like climate change, the Afghanistan transition, American women's rights, and the COVID-19 variant with grave seriousness — now seem like the reasonable ones.
There will be more of these weeks in the future, because there are always these weeks. Bad things will happen, and sometimes a lot of bad things will happen all at once. But maybe, just maybe, this week could be the beginning of something good, too — a future where we start not only to listen to warnings of what's to come, but to act on them too.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.
-
What are the main security threats facing the UK?
Today's Big Question State plots by Russia and Iran are joined by renewed efforts from Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and younger far-right extremists
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published
-
'New poll gives Harris an edge'
Today's Newspapers A roundup of the headlines from the US front pages
By The Week Staff Published
-
Threads: how apocalyptic pseudo-documentary shocked a nation
In the Spotlight The rarely shown nuclear annihilation film will reappear on TV screens this week
By Rebekah Evans, The Week UK Published
-
Will 'weirdly civil' VP debate move dial in US election?
Today's Big Question 'Diametrically opposed' candidates showed 'a lot of commonality' on some issues, but offered competing visions for America's future and democracy
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published
-
1 of 6 'Trump Train' drivers liable in Biden bus blockade
Speed Read Only one of the accused was found liable in the case concerning the deliberate slowing of a 2020 Biden campaign bus
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
How could J.D. Vance impact the special relationship?
Today's Big Question Trump's hawkish pick for VP said UK is the first 'truly Islamist country' with a nuclear weapon
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published
-
Biden, Trump urge calm after assassination attempt
Speed Reads A 20-year-old gunman grazed Trump's ear and fatally shot a rally attendee on Saturday
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
Supreme Court rejects challenge to CFPB
Speed Read The court rejected a conservative-backed challenge to the way the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
Arizona court reinstates 1864 abortion ban
Speed Read The law makes all abortions illegal in the state except to save the mother's life
By Rafi Schwartz, The Week US Published
-
Trump, billions richer, is selling Bibles
Speed Read The former president is hawking a $60 "God Bless the USA Bible"
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
The debate about Biden's age and mental fitness