Hello Selva, I had mentioned to DJ that today is a perfect day for staying at home. I could mull over matters around and over my head, chew on the unthinkable, and ruminate about what horrible events may ambush us still.
I am not going to do that to myself on a day like today, the 5th day of endless rain and forever gray.
Today is an improvement on yesterday, when it was almost pitch dark during the middle of the day, starting at around 9:00am, and seamlessly extended into the dusk hours, like the forever nights of Scandinavian winter.
My bet for tomorrow is that it will likely be a better day, with the sun out once more, and sounds of happy parents playing with their kids radiate from the beach below my balcony, from right where the storm water is now rushing down hill via ducts to join the surging and turbulent sea.
For every problem of the world, there is a solution, and for every bad egg on the planet, there are ten good folks.
The world has been improving, in fits and starts, side tracked by Inquisitions, Crusades, Indian Wars, Final Solutions, Proxy Wars, Culture Revolutions, but still improving. In the course of improvement, there is much shouting, fighting, blood spilling, and spoil sporting. But history moves on, for the better, inexorably, leaving the spoilers in the dustbin of civilization, relentlessly, and abandoning the bad guys on the trash heap of empire, mercilessly.
This journey through time-scape is often too horrible to live through, or even watch, but live and watch we must, doing what we can to survive first, and then thrive.
<<Your prognosis for what is ahead for the world is pretty dire indeed>>
I have never felt the need to comment about what may come after the dire darkness, because I figured everybody knew, and they do. People are naturally bullish, and they are right to be bullish. What they are not correct is to forget about the every-so-often interim darkness that can be and often is.
<<… children on whom I'd invested most of my working life … my first thoughts were what lies ahead for them (do you have children, if not, will you have any, if so why..) as the future world seems not to promise them good jobs, exciting, long, healthy lives, relative peace and prosperity for most of the world, freedom to travel, work and live in almost any part of the world>>
I was not given a choice on where I was born, and so it was to be in China, and not in Tobago. Had I been given a choice, I would still have chosen China, for the turbulence and excitement, the exercise and the experience, else I would have lived so much less. So it will be with my kids, when I have them, so that they know and appreciate, work and save, for a better day still.
My wife is born into a fairly well off family, with their Singapore ships, Malaysian plantations, Indonesian businesses, and Fujian family temples. She and her two siblings went to some of the best schools on the planet. However, when they were young (10 years old), they were sent to China to live with poorer relatives for a year in not entirely coddled environment for the express purpose of making them learn, know, understand, appreciate, and wanting to strive. In my view, that is what kids are for; Hope!
<<… but if this were to last till my entire lifetime, it would be terrible>>
Yes it would be if events turned out that way, but then, even if, it then just makes what comes afterwards that much better still, due the cleansing that would have taken place in reaction from the good folks.
<<Do you not have hope that a brand new politician, ideally to be the next President of the US, with entirely new ideas for the world, could bring forth new hope, vitality and new philosophies and approaches to most of the world's problems >>
No, I do not hold any illusory hope for what cannot be. The truly new ideas cannot come from the legally trained and bureaucratically incubated politicians wishing for sycophantic admiration of street mobs and who do not want to learn about what they cannot possibly understand. To start with, they do not even know what they do not know.
I think we must look elsewhere. There may already be some signs, and these may yet turn out to be false signs.
I believe changes are rarely obvious, until one fine day, boom, abracadabra, they are upon us.
Chugs, Jay |
