Unless you’ve living in a cave in Mongolia without any form of connection to the outside world, you have to realize that we, you, me and virtually everyone on earth, are living on borrowed time. It doesn’t matter what your philosophical views are, or your political or economic beliefs. The world is rapidly becoming sick, and that sickness can; and has been ignored, for awhile, – but at some point the virus becomes airborne and we’re all infected, contaminated and apparently, were an oncologist providing his prognosis, – in stage five of the disease.
It’s not just the environment, the world and nature’s health, but the attitudes of humans, the dominant form of life on this tiny orb in space. The greed, the hatred, the indifference to suffering, the never-ending seeking for ‘more’. For the poor, seeking more, – even just a little more, be it food, peace, security, health, opportunity or kindness, any would be wonderful, welcomed, invigorating and life affirming. Yet, for most of the third world, it is little more than a dream, so ephemeral that fantasies are closer to reality than even to hope.
Meanwhile, a few, billionaires, and a host of many wanna-be millionaires, possess 95% of virtually everything that there is to have. According to “Concern Worldwide”, 733 million people, or 1 in 11 people on earth, go hungry every single day. In Africa, 1 in 5 go hungry. Hunger accounts for 45% of all children’s deaths, and malnutrition is the largest single contributor to disease in the world. (Actually, those numbers are already out of date, according to the United Nations in 2024 that number rose to 828 million people).
War and climate change, nationalism, tribalism and racism, will make all of this worse, and we are fuelling all of these associated problems and endemic realities with ignorance, arrogance and indifference.
So what? , you say. It’s been like this as long as man has been on this earth. Well, actually, around the year 1900, there was a point of stasis and sustainability. The world’s population then was approximately 2.2 Billion human beings. But rather than maintain a sustainable world or the future, we enabled the rise of corporations, globalization and an unlimited appetite for acquisition. It didn’t matter what capitalism had to do in order to create the mechanisms for continuous growth and greed to become the sole criteria for industry and business to attain, we, the less than wealthy let it happen. On top of that, we were happy when a few crumbs fell off the unlimited buffet onto our empty laps.
No one in those years of unlimited growth and opportunity worried about the ‘others’, the uneducated, the poor, the disenfranchised, and the countries with no resources or wealth. Wherever there was money to e made, that was where corporations would gorge themselves. Once satisfied, with shareholders fat and happy, it was time to move on, take everything of value with you, and find a new ‘host’ to feed upon. Too bad about the landscape, too bad about the environment, too bad about the poor. That’s the way of the world, right?
And this has essentially continued unremittingly for 250 years, and in that time, the fortunate few have increased their share of the world’s resources and riches whereby today, Oxfam states the following:
Greed has come to rule, ingest and own the planet we depend on to survive, yet millions of people continue to seek the holy grail of disenfranchising those who already have next to nothing, of what little they have left.
They have become so successful at it, that they buy the politicians who were appointed to look out for the rest of us. Instead we have built kleptocracies, not democracies. The world is owned by the 1% who own the people who should protect us from the greed of the 1%.
Whistling in the Dark
Most of us ignore the worst of what’s happening, and why not? What can I do? Nothing I complain about or speak out about will change what is happening, they, “the 1%” own the media, the politicians, the wealth, and soon, those who have to date believed institutions created to secure and hold safe, democracy.
But is there really any democracy left to be had? The 1% control every facet of the democracy, from our health, wealth, education, the economy, – even the availability and compensation levels for remuneration for our labour. They have the ability to create opinion and to influence how those opinions will translate into governance, and if we don’t like their particular style of governance, they control our voice and the ability to act or action what we dislike.
Never has democracy, real democracy been more imperilled than it is at this late hour. We are on the verge of dictatorship. All the organs of power are in the hands of a very few wealthy, unethical and amoral men and women, about to exert their will on the majority, both economically, socially and legally.
The saddest part of all of it, is that it was accomplished with the agreement, acquiescence and complicity of the majority of citizens who are so encumbered with debt, self-doubt, anger, hate, racism and greed, that they have sold themselves to ‘slave masters’ with their vote.
The future has never been more tenuous, and there is no god to help us.
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