Godwin’s first law

I posted Godwin’s second law a while ago (Be careful what you measure…), and promised to eventually post Godwin’s first law, so here it is:

Godwin’s first law – proposed by my father – is that people’s concern for an issue is always in inverse proportion to its distance from them in time and space. We worry more about what we will eat for lunch today than we do about the possibility of millions of deaths in a worldwide pandemic next year. We worry more about a single drive-by shooting in our own town than we do about hundreds of thousands of deaths in an ethnic cleansing on the other side of the world.

Perhaps that is why we are so reluctant to do what is necessary to reverse global warming. Perhaps that is why we are so slow to invest in important initiatives like mapping the large earth orbit crossing asteroids that might exterminate all life on our planet some day, or controlling the thousands of industrial chemicals that are leaking into our food supply causing human disease and abnormality.

Perhaps that is why it is so hard to find statesmen who can look beyond the immediate crises and choose wise policies for the long term.