The Year To Come
Mostly, in thinking of the year to come, people's minds turn to celebration, the turning over of the old year into the new. Hope springs eternal, just as eternally spring returns from the sere chill of winter and new life begins to prove that nature has not forgotten her duty to prolonging existence. But there are other things that will also be prolonged, and they have far more to do with the nature of man than the nature of science and existence, though man's nature threatens existence.The incoming new year brings thoughts of beginnings, of celebrating the end of the last, and the incoming new possibilities. It would indeed herald change and hope for the future if we could simply bundle up everything of consequence in the global community that threatens our existence, as though we were preparing the kitchen waste for regular municipal garbage collection, and be done with it all, but that is the stuff of wishful thinking, not reality.
There is so much insecurity and uncertainty, unpredictability and volatility in the world. From the environment and climate change with all the worrying symptoms of warming oceans, melting icecaps, furious weather systems, floods, earthquakes and tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, droughts and floods all representing nature's impact on our well-being that we can do little about, but attempt to cope with.
We can hardly cope, as it is, with the overwhelming stresses on society caused by humankind's inability to accept one another, with the resulting masses of forced human migration creating more refugees in the world than ever before, fleeing conflict, and the dread of terrorist slaughter. People seeking haven, traumatized by losing their homes to pillaging marauders, women gang-raped, children abused, wounded, tormented by the fear that their parents have left them orphans.
The Kremlin's veering off under Vladimir Putin into a restoration of its former rapacious territorial and ideological ambitions, laying waste to the aspirations of its neighbours to resume their sovereign independence, hoping for more inspiring futures for their populations. A hungry bear is an angry, destructive bear, and Russia is now hungry for capital, dipping into recession, having helped to destroy Ukraine's economic future.
The economies of Iran and Venezuela look none too healthy at the moment, and they too buzz their societies like hives of angry bees waiting to sting those who complain. Eastern Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic States and Poland all waver in insecurity, never knowing whether the volatile Putin will chose to distract himself from concern over losing the economic advantage of high oil prices by selecting new geographies to inflate greater Russia with.
Turkey's government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan also entertains the world community with its lead into totalitarian Islamism while it and Qatar and Saudi Arabia proffer quiet assistance to Islamic State even while they deplore its excesses and assure NATO and the United States that this is no work of theirs and they swear to defeat the fanatics, as though they themselves are not fundamentalist fanatics of their pure version of Sunni Islam, equal to that of the Islamic Republic of Iran's Shiite version.
Radicalized Islam, to give it the more polite terminology than Islamofascism has broadened its appeal as a menace in a front across the Middle East, the Islamic Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, as tribalism and Islamism shake metaphorical hands on a mutually beneficial sprint toward a universal caliphate. Boko Haram rampaging across Nigeria, and Al-Shabab terrorizing Somalis, see their proud counterpart in the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham.
Humanity and vestiges of civilization are melting into a maelstrom of violent assertion through mass rape, bloodshed and carnage generally of the atrocity-laden type that horrifies those not fond of massacres and children disabled by the mental disequilibrium of witnessing death and destruction wherever they cast their sad, soulful eyes before they die of disease and malnutrition.
The spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran to join Islamist Pakistan, the wasting of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the swaggering domination of China whose predations have given due notice to its not-yet-cowering neighbours but forewarned of future disequilibrium; the flight of Christians from lands where that great religion was given birth and flourished on the world stage, all of this happened in 2014.
Just as well 2014 is almost behind us.
And that 2015 hovers before us, is that not an event to celebrate? Should we imagine that all the dreadful misery of the world will depart just as 2014 does, like a spirit exiting the body of the deceased?
Labels: World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, December 31, 2014
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