How Covid Became a National Security Threat

Let us count the ways.

Photo by Karl Edwards on Unsplash.

The Pandemic Era of the past 2.5+ years and counting has thrown into sharp relief many uncomfortable truths underpinning our society and communities.

COVID19, and our ongoing battle with it, has been like a vast tide going out, leaving everything revealed in its wake. This isn’t unusual: Boom times cover a multitude of sins; Lean times are always where the rubber meets the road.

As such, the coronavirus impacted our society in much the same specific way World War I changed European nations.

When countries like England tried to recruit soldiers from their impoverished working classes to fight in the war, the ruling elites made a shocking discovery:

In the post-Industrial Age, life for the working-class poor had become so terrible, military recruiters found a population so broken-down, ill and undernourished; so uneducated and prematurely-aged as to be completely useless for soldiering.

It was a sobering reality and in its unflinching light a new idea was born; that unchecked poverty was more than a drain on a nation’s most valuable, renewable natural resource, i.e. its people.

The abject poverty of the working-class was at last revealed as the serious national security threat it always was. A…