“That’s right. Cause we’re the Avengers, not the Prevengers. We step in after the damage is done.” This line, which was made by the famous Tony Stark in the Avengers finale: Endgame, might have seemed very funny in the context of the movie, but changing the situation or circumstance could actually show us that we do need to change our approach after all. Not just us: the structure, the system, the orientation, everything. The engrained mindset to react and not act. The first responder’s thinking and not the preventer orientation.
In our world today, many issues are of global concern: climate change, women’s rights, trafficking, gender equality, freedom of speech, poverty eradication, security, and so much more. Most of our systems include steps to solve a problem or stop something that has already started, but what if those problems were never there in the first place? An example is climate change. Ever since the advancement of research and technology in the 20th century, scientists have always warned of global warming and climate change as a consequence of the continued adoption of carbon-heavy or reliant systems or products. Unfortunately, at the time, most thought that was in the “far future” but now we have so many people and organizations crying out against governments and industries of the “imminent danger” that even we, the common people, are getting sick of the whole thing.
In fact, we are becoming numb to such alarms. We are less and less horrified at record-breaking disasters occurring at frequent rates. One example is the scale of wildfires. The California wildfire of 2018 was a record-breaking one at the time, burning over 750,000 hectares until the Amazon rainforest fire in 2019 burned over 900,000 hectares. And this is nothing compared to the sheer size of the Australian wildfires, which have just marked their 18,000,000th hectare.
I remember the reactions then, and I see the reactions now. People appalled by the disaster, news reporters standing in patches of land against a dark red sky, people in shock, people protesting, people raising funds, volunteers risking their lives, people forced to flee their homes. You know the drill. And it saddens me to think that once this is over, we relax till the next disaster, and then we start the cycle all over again. It’s almost like that movie that we’ve watched so many times, we can act out the scenes in our sleep. We know the words, the emotions of each character, the aahs and oohs. I remember learning in school and hearing different proverbs on how prevention is better than cure, but now, even trying to find a cure is becoming tiring and overwhelming because there seems to be so much noise coming from different directions, and we just don’t know where to turn.
But what if it’s just a phase? What if the prevention-is-better-than-cure phase was over in the 1900s, and now we just react to the world we live in? We fight for causes that we believe in, like climate change. We stop producing plastic, and we call out organizations that we think are the evildoers. All of this in response to the issues we face. But what comes after this phase, what comes after we stop caring enough to even respond to such issues? What sits at the end of this rollercoaster where everything happens in a flash, where we can’t seem to keep up with the information, the disasters, the fundraisers, the protests? Acceptance? Apathy? Disorder? Defeat?
For some, to think such thoughts might be taking it too far, maybe “too far into the future” just like it was in the 1900s. Maybe we should just focus on solving our problems instead of thinking of new ones that we might encounter. Or maybe we could go back to the drawing board. Maybe it’s not too late to change the system, this orientation of waiting till it happens. Maybe we do have a chance to be in more control of our situations. Just maybe. But how willing are we to give up the system?