The Killing Fields
This title was used to describe the genocidal rampage that took place in Cambodia years ago. Mass senseless slaughter of people for no sane reason. “The radical Communist Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, during which time nearly two million people were killed outright or died as a result of torture, disease overwork and starvation.” It was many years ago but the ‘killing fields’ expanded globally since then. After Hitler everyone said never again. But it did continue to happen in Korea, Vietnam, Rwanda, Stalin’s purge, Argentina, Honduras, the mideast, Africa, South America, the Balkans, and so on. Why, we might ask, are human civilizations in so many places turning so barbaric and intolerant?
We now live in an age where money, things, and power are King, with the best of all possible worlds for some, and the worst of all possible worlds for others. Human life is routinely expendable. More and more people in more and more countries are becoming armed, with violence begetting violence right before our eyes all over the globe. I guess this is predictable in a planet reeling from human overpopulation, religious intolerances, rapidly dwindling natural resources, and an absurdly skewed accumulation of wealth in the hand of a small group of capitalists with no regulation or limits. Entire nations become consumed by chaotic destruction of life, infrastructures, homes, schools, and whatever else is in the path of this madness. Individuals are rendered powerless, families are faced with a reign of terror, the only survival to flee to distant refugee camps. We spend billions to invade country after country to defend our own “national security”, with wars that last years, accomplish little, and then we tire of it and withdraw. Most of the time we spend billions of dollars in humanitarian help, lose track of where most of it ever went, and then observe escaped former citizens of the invaded country living amongst us, wealthy enough—perhaps a hint of where that missing money went.
Where is the U.S. in the ‘killing fields’ contest? A little over 11,000 people were killed in the U.S. in 2013. Compared to many other countries that is pretty good. Interestingly, the U.S. leads the world in average firearms per 100 people with 88.8. The next closest is Yemen with 55. Ironically, most of the leading countries in this category are not hotbeds of violence. Why is that? Apparently, in many countries where the killing fields are most active, the beleaguered people are too poor to own guns. Or, those with the guns make sure those without guns can’t get any. No guns, stoning, decapitation, assassination, are all pretty effective in terrorizing trapped ‘have-nots’.
Is violence as bad as it really seems to be across the globe and in our own country? The wild west of our past was pretty bad and the southern states have always led, and still do, in violent crimes per 100,000 population. The media thrives on reporting violent happenings and this no doubt increases our fears. Old fashioned wars, government armies against government armies, are rather a thing of the past. The only country running around the globe engaging in wars with uniformed soldiers, for the most part, is the U.S. Our opponents are not uniformed, and our own battlefield deaths are not from battlefields but from land mines, snipers, suicide bombers, planted bombs—that sort of thing. These modern wars are so brutal and senseless, with no respect at all for human life, that more U.S. soldiers died from suicide in Afghanistan than any battlefield deaths. The carnage in the two World Wars was far greater but soldier suicides were rare. Back in these days volunteer mercenaries were not used to fight wars, and everyone sacrificed greatly to conduct the war, they weren’t fought on borrowed money while all the suffering was spread around. I reckon if war is ever noble, these World wars were.
How does any country protect citizens in another country from their own thugs? McCain, who never misses a chance to promote invading another country, was himself a prisoner of war in an invasion that stands out as the most unethical war the U.S. has engaged in, at least since we eradicated, for all practical purposes, the American Indians—taking all of North and South America without leaving them even the tiniest portion of land for an independent nation of their own. While the U.S. voted that the U.N. should establish an independent Israel, there was no push to establish an independent nation of the American Indians. Justice is often illusive.
There are two basic problems we face today. While there is no country which has the remotest ability to take over our country militarily, and we could, in fact, obliterate any nation that tried, we declare ourselves threatened by such military powers as Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Grenada, etc. The only thing threatened is our control over their politics and natural resources. The second basic problem is just how do we and other nations protect backward countries from their own band of thugs, which very often are their government leaders? The situation is just weird. We can do nothing and watch the slaughter or we can intervene, fight for years, and leave the country worse off than when we entered. Nice choice.
We perhaps need ask questions which we prefer not to address. On a planet which has become overpopulated with humans, and as a consequence is depleting natural resources, generating climate change, massive species extinction, and polluting land, water, and atmosphere—how do we stop any of this? Ironically, none of these situations developed quickly. It took many decades to create these problems, and it would take many decades to reverse them. We still can’t seem to muster the focus and determination to do much about it all, and worst of all, it is too late now to get any immediate relief in an national atmosphere where few are willing to cut back or sacrifice at all.
For centuries human civilizations have progressed, in spurts, to more civilized behavior, and technical advances which have made life so much more enjoyable to live—and to live longer. We have, in theory, the brain power to have stopped any of the situations in the last paragraph. But we have met the enemy and it is us. The last thing humans needed as overpopulation commenced, is to have weapons of mass destruction—smart missiles, drones, all sorts of guns and bombs. While we now ponder how to stop the violence in third world countries, our own behavior is peculiar for the future security of our own population. We now have the most armed population in the world. We still don’t use our guns extensively, although that is a relative term. As more and more people begin to carry guns and train themselves to use guns, common sense tells us that more and more will begin to use them. We claim guns protect us, but guns can’t protect us from decreasing purchasing power, loss of pensions, the accumulation of more and more wealth into the hands of the wealthy and genetic cabals of wealth. Guns can’t replenish water reserves that are now being drawn from non-replenishible reservoirs, guns can’t restore soil fertility, stop pollution, stop political and social intolerance, educate poor children, provide medical care for all citizens, stop climate change, etc. Obama, one of those rare politicians who seems to genuinely care for all sorts of people of every race, religion, and economic class, finds himself now the target of all those who expected him to make everything better. And yet they have no idea who else could do better than him. Nor are most people in the mood for sharing or sacrificing in any way to make things better for everyone. We now wage wars with voluntary armies, mostly souls needing a job, mixed with those who enjoy the killing fields.
What do we have to face the future? We have guns and of course more and more of us will begin to use them and ‘stand our ground’. We have replaced social intercourse with gadgets that enable us to spend endless hours per day with inane chats to a handful of friends or family members. Everyone now seems to be circling the wagons under the term ‘family values’ and neighborhoods have become huge centers of everyone being very much alone together. For now, the killing fields in our country are the urban, suburban, and rural ghettoes, mixed with ‘terrorist’ killings which are growing exponentially in number. We are are fixated on security, but there is no known way to stop terrorism. Practically any of us could be a ‘terrorist’ if we so chose. The population is now shifting as the poor seek personal security and employment in the suburbs. More and more affluent are beginning to move back into cities where they can live in ‘gated’ communities or high rises with security guards at the entrance. There is little job security and it is projected that a young person will have like 30 different jobs in their lifetime. Salaries are stagnating or decreasing as the bottom line rules the roost. Full time jobs are giving way to part-time jobs and contract jobs. Health care costs are rising exponentially and no party can stop the rise in costs. We have the medical where-with-all to keep people alive, in one way or another, for months, years, decades, using equipment and personnel that are all very expensive. Organized religions are losing parishioners at rapid rates as more and more consider the rituals and church dogmas out of date and irrelevant. Those remaining operate on ‘pure faith’ blinders, filled with anger at ‘heathens’ and like deer, are frozen in place as reality bears down on them.
We are essentially living in a powder keg, a situation that could explode and bring chaos at any time. For those with wealth, there is no end to their greed—enough is never enough—while the poor have nothing more to give up, and the squeeze on the middle class just pushes more of them into poverty. We give cost of living raise to the elderly so their buying power can stay the same, but we give no cost of living to those working minimum wage jobs and thus the buying power of those in these minimum wage jobs is behind the buying power of these jobs back in the 50’s by $12-15 dollars an hour. How brilliant. With far less buying power and increasing numbers, these millions of people have no money to purchase much of anything and recession follows for everyone. The average worker now works 46 hours a week and the number of people working more than that is rapidly rising, as is the number of people working two or more jobs. Gone are the days when a low wage job could provide a simple lifestyle. If we more than doubled their hourly pay, they would still fall behind the purchasing power of the 50’s. Clearly this strangle hold on wages for jobs at the low end of the pay scale is just waiting to explode. The beleaguered poor trusted Obama to make things better, but he cannot get his policies through Congress so nothing happens. The Republicans may succeed in the near future getting control of all three branches of government, but they likely will rue the day they got such control. When our situation explodes, chaos will permeate our society—-most everyone is armed, and it could be a virtual blood bath. The police and medical personnel may have complicated emergency plans but enough of them will abandon their job to try and save/protect their families. The ‘Haves’ never win any full scale revolution by the “Have-nots”. Never in history. The ‘Have’s” have too much to protect and the “Have-nots” have nothing to lose. I suppose we could turn lose atomic bombs and blow everyone up or radiate them to death.
While all this sounds like some end of the world as we know it scenario, it must be remembered that Mother Nature bats last. The laws which govern the evolutionary process have been moving things forward for billions of years. It has never been a straight line and catastrophic events have stalled or regressed things for thousands, even millions of years. Evolution doesn’t progress on Human Time. While we have done quite well researching the past footprints of evolution, we really don’t have the smarts to envision where it is all going. We can’t really fathom how it all began (can something really come from nothing?) and any vision for the future is about just as unfathomable. But there is no real reason to conclude evolution will end, or progress be stopped. All any of us have is the present for sure, we don’t miss the millions of years when we weren’t present, and after death we can’t really miss anything about the future. Many people still envision life after death, that they can have a personal relationship with God, that some sort of God will protect them from all the land mines of life if they inherited the right religion and are dutiful to all the rituals and dogmas attached to that religion. But this is totally a faith based belief, there is no logic or reason behind such thinking.
Most of us err is thinking we personally matter too much in the evolutionary process. We don’t really comprehend responsible reproduction, the only salvation for human overpopulation. Instead we strongly feel we have a biased right to reproduce as often as we like, and that we have an endless personal special relationship with our offspring for life. It is the old cliche—“these are my own flesh and blood.” Of course we have a genuine obligation to support our offspring during their formative years, just like most advanced species must do until the offspring fly the coop and venture away to live their own life. We tend to view our offspring as near replica’s of us personally. This is genetic ignorance. If we could put hundreds of parents and kids in room with only race as the common element, and then spend weeks looking at everyone and talking with everyone—the ability to match the parents with the kids would be slim indeed. There are some small number of cases where there is a strong physical relationship between parents and offspring. Personality wise is even less of a fit. Even though there appears to be no major religion in which the prophets lived their lives in any close knit family cabal, we are more and more adopting some sort of exclusive ‘family values’ mentality where family members circle the wagon, wall themselves off from others, and go through life with an “us vs them” mentality and actually believe God rewards such behavior.
In the last analysis we can bitch, bitch, bitch about endless things, or be grateful that, by chance, a particular sperm met a particular egg, and, by chance, we got to live at a time and place with unearned genetic and environmental blessings and limitations. All we can ever do is the best we can do with the cards dealt us and hope, by chance, enough others will help level the playing field for us so that we can achieve some degree of contentment in this, our one chance, at life. We are not, cannot be, and never will be anything more than a bit player in the grand scheme. We are but a mere brick in an amazing and awesome process. For all of us to get something out of life requires the Golden Rule as the basis of human ethics. Humans are smart enough products of the evolutionary process, but even more amazing is the inherent nature of human ethics. Ethics had given us progress in civilized living, but clearly this trait is not developed enough for us to meet current challenges. That hardly means evolution is coming to an end. Not at all. To us, with transitory existence, times flies, but in reality Time Stays, WE Go. In the long run, all is well with the evolutionary process. God’s laws which govern this process are still intact. The long run means little to us personally, and if any concept is bereft of legitimacy it is the concept of ‘sanctity of life’. If there is certainty about anything it is that we all, as individuals will die. If God or His/Her laws of evolution operated with this sanctity of life concept, none of us would die. It is we who create a God in our own image and create the notion that there will be a Heaven awaiting those of us who, after being forgiven a thousand times for our sins, and having followed the dogma of our inherited religion, will end up in this Heaven, although when it comes to specifics we haven’t the vaguest idea what this means. The basis for contentment in life is based on knowing when enough is enough. Maturity can bring to us the acceptance that we are in this life but once, are to make the best of it, and live our lives according to the Golden Rule so the maximum number of people can achieve some contentment with life existence. Amen.
