Everything is interconnected;
Poor decisions
made a century ago led to a half-century of deprivations and conflicts
Well-intentioned
choices made by powerful people changed borders, governments,
created countries, and destroyed cultures and histories.
Displaced people,
upset by Empire and cultural changes split off into ever more narrow factions,
religious fracturing, extremism,
violence, intolerance, and hatred.
The desire for
unbridled control led to ever-changing alliances, wars, and overthrown
governments; the enemies of enemies became friendly allies eventually reverting to
even greater enemies than those feared initially.
Those new
enemies, knowing so much about their previous allies, turned that knowledge
into cultural and actual weapons with the never-ending outcome violence,
attacks, insurgencies,
and the mass murder of civilians and the exodus of refugees.
Migration of
desperate people combined with global climate change, weather anomalies,
famine, drought, floods, and other natural disasters resulted in political
discord, closed borders, hatred, blame, and distrust of the other, anti-Muslim
and revival and increase of antisemitism resulting
in the rising popularity of insular and autocratic governments.
Greed, the exponentially
increasing desire for fortune, power, religious, cultural, sectarian, sexual, tribal
and gender-based hatred having an inordinate effect on economies, violence,
acceptance, and national and international ethos systems
Technologies
designed to improve lives adapt to encroach on living; causing insecurity, fear,
interference, lies, theft, and loss of trust, truth, and independent thought.
Technology
also leading to loss of jobs and entire industries, causing more need by people
receiving an ever-diminishing portion of income and benefits while corporations
and the wealthy become even more prosperous.
Every year,
decade, month, week, day, and hour someone’s choice and action will be the
catalyst for an entire creation, destruction, or unintended or undesired
circumstance; everything is interconnected.
Your
unthinking words or deeds might result in another Treaty of Versailles, another
Cause of Action, Hiroshima, Overthrown Government, Al Qaeda, Daesh, Iran, Iraq,
Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Pearl Harbor, Tito, Mogadishu, Chernobyl, Fascisti,
Pol Pot, Mao, Kim Jong-un, or Hitler.
History, past,
present, and future are the roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and fruits of our
lives; think before action or speech. Feed or prune the Tree of Life as needed,
but don’t be responsible for any destructive growth undermining our
foundations.
Ronda R. Scott-Marak
© 5 December 2019
