Year 2113

It was the year of the Great Revival, following the Great Survival. It was to replenish the earth.  Replenish it of every life form possible - plants on the ground, fish in the waters, birds and insects in the air; and people, of course.  The last great war happened in 2067. 

The tragedy of wars was proven once again but the greatest tragedy of all are all the wasted lessons written on the pages of history. Is it because history is usually written by the victors?  Or, is it that victors soon forget but the vanquished, never? Or, is it the viciousness of the cycle of history to blame? Is it that defeat is not soon forgotten by the vanquished while the victors fog their memory so quickly with the sweet nectar of euphoria from victory. Victors always forget that winning is always temporary.  

Whatever is the story, one thing is for certain. Not a century had passed during the last six thousand years of recorded history when there was no human conflict of some kind on the face of the earth. Below is just what foreign policy experts are watching at the present moment. The proverbial Biblical listing of "wars and rumors of war".

Then, we are we are met with:

The New Geography of Conflict

Michael T. Klare

Foreign Affairs

Vol. 80, No. 3 (May - Jun., 2001), pp. 49-61 (13 pages)

Published By: Council on Foreign Relations

Abstract

"As last year's global shortage of petroleum and natural gas showed, the world can no longer keep up with the demands of continued population growth and economic expansion. Indeed, the competition for natural resources is intensifying. And with four-fifths of the world's oil reserves lying in politically unstable areas, with diamond and timber wars already raging in Central Africa, and with many regions suffering persistent drought, resource competition could easily turn into open conflict. Governments now see the acquisition and protection of natural resources as a national security requirement--and one they are prepared to fight for."

Back to "whatever  is the story", where all existential threat that we  worry about, none can be more devastating to life and property than the outbreak of a war.  Whether it is a limited war or one that encompasses territorial boundaries, the tragedy is frightening to contemplate; to experience it is direfully horrifying.  Along with the physical pain for those who survive is profound mental anguish that is almost impossible to assuage.  A nuclear war is unthinkable even from the most hawkish of politicians and pundits.

Added to that are threats forced upon us since the 70s, when we were warned about destroying our environment, when in 2010 we were told we had just twelve years before the catastrophe of climate change will be upon us.  Rising sea level, melting ice caps, flooding, drought, diseases, crop failures, etc. - all manifestations of our profligate use of fossil fuels, we've been told. Failed prophecies were unclaimed except that new ones are hoisted upon us once the prophets were proved wrong with such "inconvenient truths".  Again and again.

From the italicized quoted paragraph above we see instead the need for fossil fuel to sustain each nation's economy and the commercial demands for it that will persist for decades to come.  The debate continues without resolution because each side, however many sides there are, will always be only partially right.  The war on fossil fuel is not only unfair, it is not winnable.  On the other hand, an all out assault on renewable and alternative sources of energy is also a fool's errand.  The failure to compromise, lest we forget, dooms all sides.  The political rhetoric on a campaign to win votes by promising to put the oil industry out of business is an outright lie to win an election. And on and on it goes. 

Let's zoom out from here and out into the far reaches of space, as far as we can imagine. Imagine an observer from somewhere out there looking into our spot in the universe. All they will see is a swirling smudge of light.  

Our entire solar system is represented, generously I might add, as the red dot half way up along  the center vertical line (image below).  Earth is on that red dot. If the observer is told that inhabitants on that little invisible dot do not get along for some reason  and every now and then they resort to killing one another, they will find the tragic pettiness of it all.  

 

 

You know, let's imagine that we are at the place of the observer looking back at us.  It would be the same sad image that we will see.  Indeed. Yet, back to where we are today, up close on television, we seem to have become numb from the daily "breaking news".  What of the people and children and the elderly up close to where it is happening?

It is sad indeed that this tiny flotsam of a habitat in the context of the entire universe, inhabitants do not get along.

So it was in 2067 when the Great War begun. Unlike the previous wars, it ended quickly.  In less than a year it was over.  And there was no visible victor but losers all.  

There were survivors. There were those from above the foothills of the Himalayas, the interior rainforests in Brazil, and scattered along island chains in the Pacific, and remote areas of the Arctic.  2113 plus a thousand years later and the Great Revival was well established. By the six thousandth year, the world had become like it is today.

An absurd scenario?  Yes and No. Yes, by the story we've always known about how the last several thousand years went.  No, if by then, as if by some miracle or by the much hoped for Divine intervention, future generations did at last learn.

It is up to us the living who see it today to make sure that those who follow will be on a path away from 2067 and find 2113 an unnecessary chore that future generations have to endure.

Confessions

It is time to finally put in writing the things I've always wanted to confess about.  Or, should it be "to confess to"?  At this particular moment in time it is with effortless eloquence that I am able to say, "Does it really matter?" That is, of course, a far more polite version of, "Who cares?"  What am I talking about here?

Well, I wanted to make the reader guess with a few tantalizing clues. For example, I'm still in my pajamas. What's so remarkable about that? Well, it's 10:00 a.m.  And it's Tuesday. I can't be.  What? 

If you're reading this instead of a memo from your boss, you need to stop now; or, if you're mulling over a packed itinerary for a dreadful business trip on which your boss decided to tag along because he wanted to meet with your clients, some of whom you're not on a first name basis with, or worse, some don't even really know who you are, then close this page; or, reading this instead of the latest packet from HR that is required reading for the next sensitivity training where your attendance is absolutely and unconditionally required, then perhaps you had better focus on the reading material.  That is because  you're still at work, and if you must insist on reading this, then you had better be bullet proof.  Otherwise, for now, make sure you remain employable. Or, at a bare minimum, try to keep this job. Remember that if it's Tuesday and it's 10:00 a.m. and you're reading this, it is the moral equivalent of a bureaucrat reading a subversive material in Moscow in the 1950s that could result in a hasty train ride to Siberia. Or, it could be more severely punishable if you were reading this during your 15-minute break at a factory in Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution.

You know why? You're at work and you need to stay employed.  By the way, "bullet proof" only means that you are fully vested in your pension plan and that your Individual Retirement Account is to be envied by any financial adviser worth his or her salt. And you're literally months, or better still - weeks - from getting that retirement watch or some kind of memento they dole out these days commensurate with your rank and seniority in the proverbial corporate totem pole. If you are that bullet proof, then keep reading.

To the other readers: If you are like me, and unless you're planning to go somewhere, PJs and bathrobes can be normal apparel till lunch time, slippers are optional accessories. That's because, like me, you too are retired.  

To all currently employed, you had a taste of this, albeit temporarily, during the Covid lockdown.  Those pajama days are now over. Time to get back to work and insure that Social Security remains solvent; at least, for it to stay afloat for the foreseeable future of at least ten more years.  That takes care of all of us - the first and last of the baby boomers.

But what's with the confession? Sometimes, it is about guilt.  I retired on the month of April (been years now since) - and it was a particularly rainy month.  One morning, it was probably 5:00 a.m., I woke up to some distant thunder that seemed to roll ever closer like a herd of stampeding buffalos during a Serengeti migration. Then, it started raining.  Buckets. I forgot to turn off the alarm radio - again - that is tuned to the local station. It was the weather report, "We have a weather advisory. It is unseasonably cold this morning in the mid 50s and wind chill in the 40s and we expect all-day rain and thunderstorm .."  I was still half awake and dreading the prospect of having to drive on a day like that.  Then, suddenly like a lightning flash that had been getting through the blinds, I realized I didn't have to go to work that morning.  Or ever again! 

Now, you know what it is to be both feeling guilty and ecstatic at the same time.  I warned you dear reader.  If you're at work reading about this, you were warned.  I felt bad that you had to go to work today.  Drenched. Miserable too because half your co-workers didn't come to work.  The half that heard on the radio about school closings and potential widespread flooding.  Oh, well.

But it is not all that rosy for us retirees. I have nightmares.  Other retirees have confirmed this phenomenon. The dreams are vivid. I am about to make a presentation where high ranking execs will be in attendance. I was not only unprepared, I had no Power Point slides or notes.  Worse, I had no idea what I was going to talk about.  Sometimes the dream is a business trip. There would be me and other co-workers  at the airport waiting area. We were about to board.  Everyone had their tickets and boarding passes. I didn't have mine. And I had no idea why. Then how was I going to manage getting one? Sometimes, it would be about a business trip where I didn't know how to get back to the hotel.  Of course, all of these are mercifully interrupted by waking up. I was in bed at home. To any armchair dream interpreters or retired psychologists, I am open to hearing your diagnosis. Not really. Well, you can send comments.

But, surely I must miss something about not going to work.  Oh, yes, naturally. I will enumerate them without being facetious. I mean, using the true meaning of "miss". I don't want to flavor it with "I don't miss" them stuff.

1. I miss the daily commute. I miss seeing my tax dollars in action  to repair potholes or  on never ending road repairs as I drive through them.

2. I miss the bad coffee at the office and the occasional birthday cake, or leftover slices of them later in the afternoon with   icing almost crusty and brittle to the touch.  I and a few hapless folks were at an all-day meeting when the joyous occasion occurred.

3. I miss the reminders for deadlines and the stress that go along with them. I miss popping the almost daily doses of Excedrin.

4. I miss searching for the misplaced restaurant receipt, the car rental and toll receipts, etc.  Come to think of it I miss filling out an expense report.

5. I miss those meetings and the drone of presentations, one after another. I miss feeling that the presentation I made was all that mattered. 😎

6. I miss the annual evaluations. And I still have a recurring question that to this day remains unanswered. Your direct supervisor makes an evaluation of your past performance. In turn he gets evaluated too by his own direct supervisor.  Your supervisor's own evaluation by his/her boss was kept from you like a state secret.  You didn't know how he or she was evaluated for competency in handling his or her direct reports.  So, if he or she  was deemed incompetent by the higher boss, would the former's evaluation of your performance be still valid?  It would be like solving a math problem via a series of derived equations. It is like using a previously incorrect equation to arrive at the following one to get to an answer.  So, you worked the following twelve months  on how to improve your performance on a faultily derived equation, rather, evaluation.  Well, it's not really that bad. The corporation you worked for is still there. The monthly pension check still arrives. But we can't help feeling fortunate because in some cases the faulty series of equations, okay, evaluations, were so rampant, we saw Enron, Lehman Brothers, Block Buster Video, many others crumbled from the weight of a faulty tower.  Indeed, some of those bosses I talked about did get to the ivory pinnacle to wreak the greatest havoc. But, I'm just musing here, not recounting personal experiences.

7.  There has to be a 7th, right? I miss the paycheck.  Well, if you did it right, thirty years of paychecks should have been enough to accrue dividends today to do or not do what your heart desires, right? And on a rainy Monday morning, specially in January, the pay is right - nil - to not have to go to  work. 

I leave it to the reader to add his or her own misses. I'm sure you'll remember a handful of them.

I started this musing yesterday morning - Tuesday - when I woke up to a rain of felines and canines - notice the fancy wordy substitutions; so you know these are all in jest - but I didn't finish it in time. Today is Wednesday. But seriously, there were Tornadoes in the eastern part of the state.

Today and for the next few days, it is going to be sunny.  Wherever you are and in whatever state of woe you are in, everything is temporary, and remember that behind those ominous dark clouds is a ball of thermonuclear energy 93 million miles away ever ready to cloak your worries away with warmth of sunshine. Blissful rays speeding towards you at the speed of .. light.

To my fellow retirees:

That is not a sunset.  It is just another sunrise. Another bonus morning.

 

MAD-deningly Unthinkable

Much has already been said, conjectured, debated and feared about what happens next from one day to the next as the fighting in Ukraine continues. There is enough sadness, cruelty and pity to last anyone a lifetime of asking, "why?" Not only will we find it almost impossible to find answers, but what is most in everyone's mind is the uncertainty of what happens next.  That is the biggest unknown.  Instead, we are forced to face the MADdeningly unthinkable.  I upper-cased MAD for a reason.

MAD is an acronym for "mutually assured destruction".  There are a   few ways to look at that phrase.   Humanity is supposed to take comfort in the fact that nations are deterred from unleashing the unspeakable nuclear weapons of war because each side will most assuredly be destroyed. But we are at a point now where there is enough in the stockpile of nuclear arsenal from the handful of nations combined who have them  to annihilate the entire human race several times over. It is maddening enough and thoroughly unthinkable at the same time.

But why?  Just when memories of the cold war are almost forgotten even by those who lived through it, and clearly non-existent in the thoughts of the last two or three generations, we are faced with the stark reality that indeed none of all the so called existential threats that politicians and pundits from every corner of academia and society have warned us about will compare to the one most unthinkable possibility.

But why, indeed? I will get a lot of pushback from this musing but first I only ask the reader to bear with me for a bit.  

Just when hardly anyone can remember what ICBM stands for or that nobody might even remember what MIRV is, we are now faced with the idea that such vessels of destruction are still out there - sitting in their land based silos or cruising underneath the oceans in the bellies of nuclear powered submarines or beneath the wings of aircraft in undisclosed hangars from all over the world. Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) are bad enough but what of the multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRV) that military euphemists tried so hard to give those harbingers of destruction a polite label. But there is no hiding the fact that a single payload can disgorge several independently programmed nuclear bombs upon re-entry into another land thousands of miles away with dead-on accuracy and devastation.

Again, why does humanity manage to get itself inextricably mired in the trajectory of self destruction?

First, let me get a partial quote from my last musing, innocuously titled Brigadoon.  I wrote about  the oldest tree in the world that had lived and still living for the last 5,000 years - The Great Basin Bristlecone pine:

The tree was a sapling right about when one of the pyramids in Egypt was completed, and perhaps over 2,000 years before the birth of Christ.

That tree, if it is tuned to what had gone on around the world since, had seen the growth of the world population, wars and pestilences, the shifting powers of conquerors and dictators, despots and notable leaders, beheld the plight of the enslaved and grimaced at the cruelty of the enslavers, and today is still a witness to what is going on in the Baltics, primarily what is happening in Ukraine and everywhere else.  Time may have stood still for that tree as generations upon generations of people had come and gone.

The tree, remaining standing still at one place, had witnessed the same theaters of war, protagonists of victorious conquerors and subjugated  peoples who fought over the same territories for centuries of repeated lessons unlearned, set aside and ignored.

Let me bring in here one of the famous generals who fought in the last world war - Gen. George S. Patton.  He had his admirers and detractors, his share of supporters and critics, and those who made note of, though others took it less seriously, his seemingly obsessive belief in reincarnation. Patton believed he would emerge victorious in his campaign in Europe because he had fought in the same battlefields over and over in his many incarnations as a warrior throughout history.

He intimated those beliefs to those close to him but he immortalized it in the poem he wrote, 

Through A Glass, Darkly by George S. Patton

Through the travail of the ages,

Midst the pomp and toil of war,

I have fought and strove and perished

Countless times upon this star.

In the form of many people

In all panoplies of time

Have I seen the luring vision

Of the Victory Maid, sublime.

There are a few more stanzas in between and he ended with:

So forever in the future,

Shall I battle as of yore,

Dying to be born a fighter,

But to die again, once more.

{The phrase "through a glass darkly" is a partial quote from Paul's letter to the Corinthians, 1, 12-13. Patton's poetry is unrelated to a movie of the same title}

Please read the verses one more time.

If the world manages somehow, or the powers that be will make it happen, we can all exhale a collective sigh of relief as if waking up from a nightmare. Are we then to fall asleep peacefully?

WWI ended on Nov. 11, 1918, after Germany surrendered four years after it started. It was so horrific that the Geneva Convention outlawed the use of chemical weapons.  It was supposed to be the war to end all wars.

But in just one generation, WWII broke out in 1939.  Lest we forget, Great Britain and France guaranteed the integrity of the borders of the Polish state on March 31, 1939. The following August, Germany (re-established as a military power once more) and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty. The following month Germany invaded Poland. Also, not to be forgotten, Japan earlier invaded Manchuria in 1931, then China in 1937.  In 1941, it declared war against the United States and went on a war campaign throughout the Pacific.

Both countries pledged after WWII, since affirmed in their respective constitutions, that they will not raise an army again, except for civil defense only.

Today, another chapter is being written. Western Europe just woke up to another specter of conflict that can conflagrate uncontrollably.  Russia, though far from a manufacturing economic power, wants to re-constitute its earlier empire in eastern Europe, using the hammer of petroleum at its disposal.  Japan is waking up to the looming economic power that is China that is flexing its military capabilities.

The question is: What are Germany and Japan to do? Germany is an economic heavyweight in Europe but a military weakling. Japan had lost its economic luster and clearly militarily defanged. Both are hearing from subtle voices that could be interpreted as a call to re-examine their constitutions to protect their interests.

If the world makes it through and temporary peace is achieved in the Balkans, we have much to be thankful for. However, we also have much to think about. Conditions will remain unchanged. In Europe, Russia will still have control of much of the oil to feed the contiguous economy of its neighbors to the west.  In Asia, China will continue to be the manufacturer of cheap merchandise for much of the world; cheap labor for the ever increasing demand for smartphones and electronics, tennis shoes and garments, etc. And it will have a mighty military power with nuclear weapons.  It is also home to a billion consumers of entertainment from western providers that are only too willing to acquiesce.

Much can be said of both Germany and Japan that despite being reduced to rubble after WWII, both made spectacular recoveries to get both their economies to unprecedented heights.  Japan may have weakened its economic dominance but it remains an economic force to reckon with, though now trailing behind S. Korea and China.

Germany and Japan, to be expected of any nation, will want to keep their economies strong in their respective regions but they will continue to lack the natural resources for material and energy. Add to that the potential of being cut off from both and they will be faced with the same trepidations pre - 1914 and 1939. Recent events are stark reminders of the same scenario.

I leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions. 

We know so much about human nature and its inability to learn from its past. Through the pages of history, we know that it takes only one future charismatic leader, one mad man, who can lead a dedicated group of people waywardly to plunge right back into the maddeningly unthinkable idea of re-armament in the midst of regional instability.  It had happened twice before in recent history. 

It would seem alarmist to think this way but fast-forward to two decades from today and will the reader think the same way?

What about the Great U.S. of A? Will it once again become the peace agent and arbiter of world conflict as it had done twice before?  Would it have the will to reprise its role in WWI and WWII.  

Will it be its old self in 2050? I refer to what I wrote on Oct. 5, 2021, "2050: The Ebb of the Tragic Trajectory of a Once Powerful Nation".

I remain hopeful that none of what I fear will happen.  But a portrait of a dark scenario is what we need to awaken to the reality of the maddeningly unthinkable in order for us - collectively as a whole - to realize the folly of our nature and to pray and work hard towards goodwill among all.

Are we to be complacent or hopeful based on this quote from Matthew 24:6, From the New Testament, KJV

"And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet".