A Bright Future
Isn't life wonderful, and isn't it quite lovely that we can anticipate a future of greater prosperity around the world, as emerging nations find themselves increasingly able to feed their populations, and the wealthy countries of the world are increasingly willing to aid and assist the less well endowed countries of the world. We could do no less as fellow human beings.We will find solutions to the worries that climate change has brought to our fearful attention, and in so doing ensure the future looks green and bright for all our children. We will realize that there really is a limit to consumption, and we have overstepped the bounds of those limits, personally. We will satisfy ourselves with far less, to ensure that there is sufficient bounty of the land to supply elsewhere.
We will live with the profound satisfaction of knowing that human beings have been able to successfully suppress avarice and selfishness so that they might willingly and with grace share the abundance they waste with those who have so long lived in poverty. Medical science will have increased its impetus toward research availing us all in our human battle against dire disease.
We will re-focus our values. To understand the full extent of the privileges we enjoy, and so cavalierly take for granted. We will learn to pay closer attention to those whom we live so closely with, from our families to our communities. To forge closer bonds and exact greater satisfaction from personal relationships. To ensure that our children receive the emotional and disciplinary needs they require to mature as healthy individuals.
That's the future we could share with one another. From those on the street we live with, to the larger, global community. What's that old tale about pigs flying? It could happen, though, if we willed it to. If we somehow could manage to surmount the lesser of our human emotions and proclivities, and harness instead those greater emotions and values that make us divinely human.
Instead, we're being informed that over the next twenty to thirty years we face an increasing risk of violent conflict. That an unprecedentedly swift shift in wealth and power transference is set to take place from West to East. Well, that needn't necessarily auger ill for humankind and the globe, one would imagine.
But the struggle for a finite supply of basic foodstuffs, for fuel, for creatively strategic technologies is currently being unveiled globally. And then there is the spectre, the very ugly and very real reality of the creeping spread of weapons of mass destruction. All of a sudden that pretty picture of the future is beginning to look hopelessly tarnished.
Conditions of human conflict continue to emerge, with risk of terrorist attacks growing throughout the world, encompassing Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East. Chemical, biological and nuclear materials are all involved; science that has so ennobled and enriched the history of humankind has also presented us with the evil scourge of destruction.
China, India and Brazil are poised to emerge in the next few decades as global economic and political superpowers. All to the good. But in the same token some of these superpowers will also emerge as military superpowers. China has its problems with its recalcitrant regions, India with its nuclear-sharing neighbour.
Those economies will more than match those of the wealthy West and beyond, but it's the military aspect that represents a huge unknown.
Russia's re-emergence as a regional heavyweight in political sway, in economic growth, in military might, casts its own shadow over eastern Europe and the Middle East with its traditional alliances becoming more complex and perhaps increasingly dire for future predictability. These are the countries who seek and will succeed to dominate in world affairs.
While, we're informed, 1.4-billion of the world's people will suffer from a lack of potable water, and water for agricultural use, in already-scarce environments. Global tensions are guaranteed to increase exponentially, based on all of these realities and predictions. Radicalism will be encouraged by these situations of want and desire.
The neat and orderly world that we would like to envision is more likely to collapse into complete disorder as discontent and arrogance continue to live side by side in global dysfunction. What bright future?
Labels: World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, November 02, 2008
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