I guess I’m a glass-half-empty guy most of the time. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s just that I see what’s happening in the world and find myself less than optimistic about outcomes and trends.
History has taught me that bad players often enough get their way, if only for a time. They get to have their moment, even if eventually they are stopped or stop themselves when they see the walls closing in. They get to wreak the damage and the suffering they seem so keen on dispensing, their warped ideologies carrying the day for too long, reluctantly embraced by people too afraid or too desperate to question the propriety of it all.
The internal resistance is there, but it is easily controlled because it’s deprived of the tools that would make it a force to be reckoned with. Of course I’m talking about people like Vladimir Putin and maybe Xi Jinping, but especially Putin. It seems he has mastered the strategy of crushing dissent before it has a chance to spread too far and deep. He has mobilized the military to fight Ukraine and eventually prevail, emboldened to set his sights on the next target, maybe a NATO member.
I’ve been looking at everything differently lately—the minutes and moments in my daily life that I cherish and have mostly taken for granted. The interactions with family, the simple pleasures of electricity and internet and running water and food availability and all the creature comforts that contribute to making this life bearable and even enjoyable.
The insidious and maddening and frightening part comes when I realize that someone like Putin and his cohorts would love nothing more than to take away all those things, sabotaging them, fomenting panic, turning us against each other and creating chaos. We know that Putin and people like him hate us with a burning and blinding passion. He will stop at nothing to destroy us. This is what bothers me every day—that there is someone out there with the growing means to destroy our way of life, someone who dreams of doing exactly that.
It’s both rage-inducing and troubling, that we find ourselves needing to address this threat, distracted from tending to other needs that one might think should be more important.
3 Cents' 