Self-centred thoughts

As far back as I can remember I've had a keen interest in the world around me. Among my earliest memories is of living in my maternal grandparents' home in the early 1930s; it was a partly Jewish household and the conversational fragments I heard and partly understood often conveyed their anxiety about family members who seemed to be in grave danger in Europe. A few years later when I learned to read, the newspaper headlines and stories were almost all about wars in Manchuria, China, Abyssinia, Spain, and about the aggressive expansion of the Nazi regime beyond the borders of Germany. From 1939 to 1945 the news was all about episodes in the second world war. At first the news was unremittingly bad: defeats and retreats everywhere. Slowly the tide turned and our side began to win strategically important battles as well as minor skirmishes. Peace in August 1945 was uneasy, fragile and incomplete. Vicious civil war in Greece and wars of liberation from colonial masters in what had been the Dutch East Indies, French Indo-China, and sundry obscure African colonies erupted; the colonial liberation war in French Indo-China morphed into the American-led war in Vietnam. The Korean war began in 1950, and more than 60 years later the two Koreas remain sunk deep in mutual suspicion and paranoid hatred. In the Congo and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, war has taken 5-10 million lives. Increasingly vicious and bloody conflicts erupted in Latin America, originally between dispossessed and landless rural subsistence farmers and wealthy landowners whom the Americans supported, again in the mistaken belief that these were wars against the supposedly evil empire of the Soviet Union, which was evil in some respects, but also riddled with corruption and incompetence, and ultimately proved unsustainable, collapsing in 1989. Living in the USA in 1964-65, Wendy and I found some aspects of the American way of life profoundly disturbing, notably the strident militarism that led to limitless expenditure on costly new weapons. I remember thinking that this bottomless pit into which the nation poured its wealth (mostly borrowed wealth) was unsustainable in the long term. The day of reckoning is nigh. It's beginning to dawn on even ideologically driven politicians that they've gone wrong somewhere, somehow. The nation owes trillions, many individual Americans have credit card debts equal to a year's wages or more. It's different in Canada, but if the USA defaults on its astronomical loans the world's monetary system will collapse and nothing will ever be the same again. And this at a time when all that wasted wealth is very urgently needed to invest in ways we must adapt to the rapidly developing global climate crisis. Food prices are rising because a series of coinciding natural catastrophes -- floods, droughts -- directly due to climate change, have reduced food reserves while demand continues to rise. Fish stocks, previously up to a quarter of human protein intake, are depleted, because over-fishing and predatory maritime fishing methods are driving many species to extinction. Safe, secure supplies of the most essential resource, fresh water, are depleted and diminishing, causing confrontations and incipient violent conflicts that are likely to be more deadly than ever. I fear that the next few decades will not be pleasant for humans, nor probably for many other life forms. Selfishly, I'm glad I'm growing old, but I'm very uneasy about the state of the world my children and grandchildren will inherit.