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All the world’s a stage

November 23, 2016   ·   0 Comments

Well, well. I had dinner the other night with two people, a lady and a gentleman, not more than friends, you know, not a couple, who are Trump fans, glad he won. They gave me lots of reasons why.

Most pointedly, “I’m tired of politicians!” exclaimed the gentleman. “Tired of them, all the same, get nothing done and spend all the money!”

We are all playing a role in this life, some with more influence than others but, at the end of the day, when it comes time to voting, we all have our equal chance at influencing, if we care to bother.

It seems that nothing can go right on the world’s wide stage. Hard to believe the barbarism going on, on every side and, for me, the rise of the Savage Right (my coin) is, potentially, the worst of all.

In the Middle East, there are horrors as bad as there have been in any of our “glorious wars.” The intensity of the ravage and killing is beyond what any of us can imagine and thank goodness we can’t.

Yet every country, even our own, is having a part in this; there are no innocent by- standers. Those who are not altogether imbued with the dealing of arms, are playing video games that are happy shadows of the horrors, a celebration in gaming, as it were.

The global human mass is completely exhausted: with war, killings, poverty, leaders lying, mixing us up in ways that, apparently, aren’t working; keeping us down intellectually, with sour propaganda and financially, with messing with the books.

For the last several years, we have been rebelling against the tsunami of outrageous leadership. From Occupy Wall/Bay Street to the “Arab Spring,” to this current raging politics, there has been a bottom-of-the-shoe (under which we have all been kept forever) revolution which is finally culminating in the savage political movements we see all around us.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, in a country not that far away, there was a (physical) wall of tyranny, in Germany. People were shot trying to cross it, for no reason, just for tyranny. One day, the people rose up and tore that wall down while the world looked on and cheered. It brought tyranny in that small corner to an end. Fast forward to this Century and the proposed end to tyranny in other corners was met with death and this meeting was engaged by us too. We took part in the Arab Spring with our own weapons and, no matter what the intention was, people died.

In the end, how were things improved?

Now, in North Africa, where it all began, there is still  tyranny with no resolutions, and to the East, in Syria but, of a necessity, spreading throughout the lands, the fight to be the ruling tyrants still boils, with us up to our collective necks in it.

Hence, the terrifying rise of the Savage Right. Its triumph to the south of us has American Generals trembling. An interview with three of them on the CBC Radio One’s program, the Current, before the election, heard one of them say, “We can’t believe that the American people would be so stupid as to elect Donald Trump.” And “the Generals can decide – but they would only have seconds to do so – if an order from the President [to fire a nuclear bomb] is illegal, in which case, they could refuse to do so.”

The President-Elect reflected on talk shows more than once: “We have those bombs, why can’t we use them?”

We are all to blame. Our leaders are raised in their own countries. They learn what they know in their homelands. If we educate our children badly, if we are stingy and stupid  about education, having disdain for the subjects of philosophy, the arts and the humanities in their early years of learning; if we stick their minds up the back end of computers and leave them there to rub elbows with all the sins of the world at too early an age, and neglect teaching them fundamentals about arithmetic (remember that?), about writing by hand; about being human and  keeping computers in their place as mere machines….

We are all to blame. We allow medicine to poison us without any regard for the power houses our natural bodies and brains are, in fact; we refuse to take breaks from being constantly in contact with the virtual world, putting ourselves under implied and actual stress totally alien to our natures; in other words, we are living in an imbalanced mental and physical state all the time.

We are all to blame because we are bored and in love with the idea of “extreme” with a tight constriction on the rational. Eventually, of course, there will be no place left to go because when we finally get to Mars, we will learn there can be no peace there, either.

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