The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE POWER OF HUMAN CHOICES” mentioning Patrick J. Leahy was published in the Senate section on pages S127-S128 on Jan. 25.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
Senators' salaries are historically higher than the median US income.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE POWER OF HUMAN CHOICES
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, amid the chaos of the last 4 years, it is almost difficult to parse out the particular challenge that was 2020. Faced with deadly pandemic wrought by COVID-19 and the ensuing economic crisis, millions of Americans lost their jobs and found themselves in a newfound state of uncertainty and instability. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from the pandemic, and millions have been infected. Meanwhile, families across the country have lost their homes and businesses due to worsening hurricanes, floods, and wildfires brought on by intensifying climate change. And there are socioeconomic challenges, too, that linger and grow due to inequality, political division, and racial injustice, all things that have defined the last year.
George Will poignantly wrote on January 1 in the Washington Post about the challenges we faced throughout the past year and will continue to face moving forward. In his piece, Mr. Will highlights a greater overarching challenge as well: that we, as humans, do not have all encompassing control over our circumstances. There are greater forces in play; yet our choices and decisions can dictate to some degree the impact of those forces.
As we begin our work in the 117th Congress, I hope we can come together to better equip our families, communities, and society to respond to our current challenges and prepare our country to effectively combat similar challenges in the future.
I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Will's column, ``2020 was a booster shot against human hubris,'' be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
2020 Was a Booster Shot Against Human Hubris
(By George Will)
The plague year 2020 was yet another brutal rejoinder to the belief that brute forces can be pushed to the margins of, and eventually out of, humanity's experience. When today's pandemic recedes, what should linger is a quickened appreciation of the fragility of life and social arrangements. And an awareness that things much worse than covid-19 have happened before, and will continue to happen. The human story is not entirely about human choices.
The 1918-19 ``Spanish flu,'' which began in Kansas, killed between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide, lowered U.S. life expectancy by 12 years, and did not spare, as covid-19 largely does, the young. The Black Death--the bubonic plague--of 1346-1353 was much worse, killing 10 percent of the world's population, and more than one-third of Europe's, including 40,000 of London's 70,000 residents.
In the 1980s, AIDS was so shocking because it refuted the complacent belief that infectious disease epidemics had been banished. In 2019, however, 1.7 million people were newly infected with the AIDS virus, and 690,000 people who were already infected died. But of the 38 million living with the virus, 25.4 million were controlling it with antiviral drugs.
Astronomy lowered mankind's self-esteem (we are not the center of the universe), then biology did (our species has an undistinguished pedigree). Geology, too, has disturbed our sense of mastery. Genesis enjoins us to ``subdue'' the Earth, but this slowly cooling residue of the Big Bang gets a vote. As its continents wander--half an inch to four inches a year, according to plate tectonics--the planet's interior of boiling gas and molten rock occasionally is heard from.
Volcanic eruptions at what is now Yellowstone National Park some 630,000 years ago covered half of what is now the continental United States with ash. When the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, sea surges, which killed most of the eruption's eventual 36,000 victims, were felt in the English Channel. Krakatoa, was, however, only one-tenth as powerful as the April 1815 eruption of Indonesia's Mount Tambora, which killed 10,000 instantly--incandescent ash flowed 100 miles per hour--and generated winds that uprooted trees. Particulate matter blocking the sun's rays cooled the Earth: Water froze in some American cisterns on July 4. Today, a large majority of the one-eighth of the nation's population that lives in California resides near the San Andreas fault, and the question is not if but when it will lurch catastrophically.
A U.S. satellite poised between Earth and the sun can provide perhaps a 45-minute warning if the sun is going to plunge the planet into darkness. On Sept. 2, 1859, before there were light bulbs, a coronal mass ejection (CME) of 100 million tons of charged particles thrown off by the sun only produced spectacular sunsets. If--actually, when--it happens again, it can produce chaos in our thoroughly electrified, digitized world by induced electric currents: no functioning satellites, telephonic communications, water pumps, financial transactions, hospitals. No Netflix. That got your attention.
On March 13, 1989, a CME solar storm turned out the lights in the entire Canadian province of Quebec. Three days earlier, a NASA astronomer says, scientists had noticed ``a powerful explosion on the sun. Within minutes, tangled magnetic forces on the sun had released a billion-ton cloud of gas. It was like the energy of thousands of nuclear bombs exploding at the same time. The storm cloud rushed out from the sun, straight towards Earth, at 1 million miles an hour.'' This geomagnetic storm struck the Earth the evening of March 12, creating ``electrical currents in the ground beneath much of North America,'' crashing Quebec's power grid.
There are those who believe in a benevolent God because Earth, as they see it, is ``biophilic,'' meaning friendly to life. They must, however, reckon not only with non-biophilic things (saber-toothed tigers, volcanoes, typhoons, viruses, etc.), but also with the fact that this (meaning: everything) is not going to end well. The universe will either continue to expand, ending in life-extinguishing cold, or will collapse into incinerating heat.
Meanwhile, here is some (sort of) good news, from the Economist. In history's bloodiest century, the last one, 100 million to 200 million people died as a result of war. Measles killed in the same range, influenza near the top of the range. Smallpox, however, killed 300 million to 500 million.
The eradication of smallpox, by globally coordinated vaccination campaigns, ``stands as one of the all-time-great humanitarian triumphs.''
Human choices cannot subdue all the brute forces that always lurk. Choices can, however, make a difference. And they can dignify us, a thinking, coping species.
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