I’m sitting here, as another Sept. 11 passes, and I’m thinking about a lot of the people here on campus who are going to read this.
Currently, we’re weighing our country’s options on how to respond to the chemical weapons attack in the Middle Eastern country of Syria. This at a time when our country’s armed forces are still at war in Afghanistan and maintain a presence in Iraq.
I’m old enough to remember a time when the United States was not in a state of perpetual warfare. Some of my fellow LPC students are not.
With the next generation of young people who come through LPC and colleges all over the country, that memory will fade even further. As time becomes history, in lieu of a titanic shift in world events, war will become the new normal.
That’s what our world now demands — many of the people may not but the demands of the global economy and the infinite motivations of the forces in control of it ensure that someone, somewhere, at any time, will cause the world trouble.
Not to mention the myriad of religious and tribal concerns, many which have been ongoing since time immemorial.
You’ve got the United States who is allied with Israel who’s locked in pitch battle with Iran who is allied with Syria who’s allied with Russia who is supposedly allied with the United States but is very likely allied with our fiercest enemies as well, such as North Korea and Iran. Then there’s the wildcard of two of the world’s biggest global economic superpowers, Saudi Arabia and China, could swing any way, at any time.
Got it?
Sure, you do. The complexity of the current geopolitical climate is simple to grasp.
Wait. No, it’s not.
I do my best to be an informed individual and I would need to study for most of the rest of my life to fully understand how all the threads fit together.
What I do understand is that ever since 9/11, the world has become one large clustercuss. Everyone is at war with everyone and everyone is watching everyone watching them watching everyone.
No one trusts anyone else.
It’s hard not to get too downhearted when one contemplates where we’re at as a species.
We’ve put the world in the palm of everyone’s hands in the form of smartphones. Where once people only saw what was in front of them, human beings now have access to the entire world.
We cure more and more diseases and are inching ever closer to discovering how matter is even able to exist.
We’ve come so far, yet still can’t seem to overcome the desire to blow each other up for stupid reasons. We have the knowledge of our past mistakes and no drive to stop repeating them.
I’m sitting here writing this, and struggling to find a positive place to leave anyone reading this.
The world was not always quite this way.
It’s been bad before and it’s real bad now, but the longer we persist, the longer we have to figure out peaceful means of resolving problems.
Things tend to happen in waves. They go up and crash to varying degrees. Occasionally they rise so high as to swallow entire land areas.
But eventually, they break and roll back towards the sea which eventually calms.
Here’s to hoping the tide of world chaos someday breaks and subsides.