Good Ike, I do hope you are right and I am wrong but I must, with no joy, take issue with:
Idea of the day..
''The people of the future will not say, "I belong to the nation of England, France or Persia"; for all of them will be citizens of a universal nationality--the one family, the one country, the one world of humanity--and then these wars, hatreds and strifes will pass away. - ''
All have sinned and will continue to do so (of course, some much more egregiously than others, and that distinction is a very important...Hitler, Stalin, etc., can claim a special place in the pantheon, though, to be sure, they and their like could wreak their brutal havoc only by convincing many not too different from ourselves to follow them). I do believe many more metamorphases will be necessary to anneal all of us, kin and caboodle, to the ideal of human and humane common cause (if it can be achieved at all). The next step, I fear, is that England, the US, Brazil, etc., the current nations, will give way, or are giving way, to the members of the nations of Microsoft, GE, SAP, Nokia, SONY, etc. (many of whom have their own flags and national anthems already), and the future Third World will not be defined by geography but will constitute those anywhere who do not have status or refuge in one of these new nations. And whether a member of one of the new nations or not, all of us will be held in thrall, one way or another, to the secular global nation of computerization. I also wonder, at times, if this new order brings merely a less visible or more cosmetized brutality, maiming, and murder (starvation vs bullets and bombs) to the unenfranchised. Of course, this would mean all the more need to hold the ideal before us and, either way, we have no other choice than to do precisely that. |
