Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details.I know why the dinosaurs went extinct: They stopped believing. by J. G. Fabiano I was walking near Harvard Square the other day with a few colleagues after a conference at the museum when one of them made the comment: "I know why the dinosaurs went extinct." Since the conference concerned biodiversity and why species go extinct the comment was relative. "OK, I'll bite", I told the young teacher who usually stays quiet. He answered in a way I thought he wanted to make it sound like a punch-line of a joke. He said: "They stopped believing." For the past few weeks I have been thinking about his comment and compared what happened to the dinosaurs to what is happening to our society. For example health insurance in our nation is abominable. An estimated 15.2 percent of the population had no health insurance coverage during all of 2002; up from 14.6 percent in 2001, according to the report, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2002. The proportion of insured children did not change in 2002, remaining at 64.8 million, or 88.4 percent of all children. For the second year in a row, the overall decrease in coverage was attributed to a drop in the percentage (62.6 percent to 61.3 percent) of people covered by employment-based health insurance. When this problem is discussed throughout the nation most people do not care. They actually believe this a normal situation that has always existed. They believe the cost of health insurance for all people is simply too expensive and that everyone should be responsible for his or herself. They just don't believe it is their governments and thus their responsibility to offer health care for all. They stopped believing a government is responsible for the basic necessity of health insurance for all of our population. The basic problem here is all of our healthcare has inflated and continues to inflate because of this lack of basic health care for all. Another example could be the poverty rate in our nation. Looking up the United States Census Report I see the nation's official poverty rate rose from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.1 percent in 2002 and median household money income declined 1.1 percent in real terms from 2001 to $42,409 in 2002, according to reports released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Median earnings increased 1.8 percent for women who worked full-time, year-round and 1.4 percent for similar men, and the child poverty rate remained unchanged in spite of any recession. Have, we as a society simply given up taking care of our own? Maybe the rich have become so rich while the poor have become desperately poor that the bridge between the haves and the have-nots has been eliminated producing two distinct societies. The basic problem is the have-nots are simply trying to survive while the haves do not care which is synonymous with not believing. There are many hypotheses about how the dinosaurs no longer exist. One concerns a natural disaster that changed the environment in which these massive creatures existed in. Maybe the dinosaurs ignored the warnings of these changes in climate or even ignored the other dinosaurs when they suffered through a meteor shower or other natural calamity. It is easy to compare these guesses to what is happening today. It is common knowledge our climate is changing because of what we put in the air we breathe. Instead of working toward a solution our world's governments are arguing whether or not this problem exists. As to societies in general they ignore the warning signs by simply not believing that anything natural could lead to their own extinction. As for natural disasters, the dinosaurs not directly involved with the problem must have gone their own way and continued to care about themselves instead of taking care of their society as a whole. The Gulf disasters mirror this problem. After the shock of seeing thousands of people stranded without food, water, or shelter most of the country changes the channel on their television sets whenever an image of people still suffering on our southern border comes up. I guess they stopped believing that anytime anyone suffers in our society it is the responsibility of the whole society to eliminate the misery. I wonder if the dinosaurs ever went to war with each other. I wonder if they ever sent their bravest to another part of their world to battle other dinosaurs because they believed in something else. Even though 20,000 of their best were either killed or injured to the point they could no longer fight or the foreign dinosaurs they killed numbered in the tens of thousands, the dinosaurs at home stopped believing the loss of any of their own was a loss to them. Driving home from Harvard this same young teacher asked why I was so quiet. I told him I just figured out why so many of our problems simply won't go away: "We stopped believing." The End.
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