I’ve spent a lot of time researching this topic, writing about it, and teaching about it. This is the time everyone needs to act to prevent societal collapse in the US.

To my Eugene friends, let me know if you want to meet up at the Eugene protest.

Be safe everyone ❤️ Stay strong!

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to see firsthand what happens when societies collapse—initially in my work in the former Yugoslavia (literally identifying murdered people in mass graves) and then later studying the aftereffects of the fall of the USSR on the health of Russians

I also think there’s a huge amount of power in some of the more trusted professions marching to bring attention to the risks of the current trajectory--perhaps bringing together scientists and medical providers. We need to start building this momentum. Nobody will be able to hide from this.

As we head into a deepening constitutional crisis, my take is that the only way this is averted is through mass demonstrations. These will need to build and grow for them to have any effect.

But this work in the former Yugoslavia, along with 12 years of work that I did co-directing a project in Russia examining the health effects of the fall of the Soviet Union, convinces me otherwise. It terrifies me.

The situation in Yugoslavia degenerated fast into a full-scale societal collapse and genocide yet this seemed like it shouldn’t have been possible given extensive intermarriages. You may think that something like this could never happen in the US, that we are somehow special or immune.

Yes, there were ethnic tensions that emerged in the post-communist period and lit the match, but people I spoke to talked about killings being in response to killings which themselves were responses to killings. Once it starts, it is almost impossible to stop.

Those wars of the 1990s are often characterized as ethnic wars or wars of independence—as Yugoslavia split into separate countries including Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, & Serbia—but what will always stick with me from my time there is how so many locals characterized the war as the result of revenge.

I worked on one of the first UN forensics teams to gain entry into the region after the wars, with our goal to identify the dead and document trauma in order to provide evidence for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Most of the deceased had been tortured and murdered.

(I also know that so many of us feel overwhelmed by the demands of work and life. I write this feeling underwater at work with hundreds of unanswered emails and way too much to do. And I'm working from home with a sick kid. But we have to do this!)

The situation is 1000 times worse today. And it feels even more risky to protest today than 2017. But the consequences of silence will be devastating to science, medicine, public health, and the world. I know we are overwhelmed and scared but we have to organize and make our voices heard!

It’s surreal to think back about the march, to look at pictures of the signs people carried warning about the dangers of a pandemic if science was defunded and decisions about public health politicized. About what will happen if we don’t address climate change. We should have pushed back harder.

It was about raising awareness about the effects of climate change, the dangers of pandemics, and the consequences of politics driving medical and public health decisions. And about the real costs of defunding science.

The march was deliberately not anti-Trump but was pro-science, and while many were uncomfortable with political action we also knew we had to organize and make our voices heard.

We had an estimated 7,000 people march in New Orleans and it was energizing to the community and helped us find the strength and develop plans for coordinated action.