On the morning of the Russian invasion of
Ukraine, I was in need of some serious reset and therefore went for a nice wander on
the beach.
It is a rare thing to live through a moment of huge historical consequence and understand in real time that it is what it is. From an early age, one of my keen and deep interests has been 20th century history. I have a large collection of videos,
DVDs’ and books on the subject, with many that I have viewed or read more than
once or twice. As a result, I would say, my knowledge is good and my ability to
compare is reasonable. As I look out onto the world, I would say our fragile
planet is possibly under more threat today than at any time in the past 120
years.
We currently have a situation of sharing our
world with far too many foreign dictators and terror groups, all with inflated
feelings of pride and superiority, which is dangerously combined with an agenda of destruction and human suffering. While in other parts, we are being guided by increasingly poor leadership, whose
actions and resulting failures continually add to our vulnerability, in the
form of heightening levels of climate change, out of control national debt, increasing political divisiveness, questionable levels of govenrnment sponsored political correctness, troubling weakness and much more.
In 1968, Jim Lovell the Command Module Pilot of
Apollo 8 said in reference to planet earth ~ "When I put my thumb up to
the window (of the command module) I could completely hide it, and then I
realized that behind my thumb I was hiding this earth where there are about 6
billion people that are all striving to live there."
When I stand back and look at all that is going
on in the world, I wonder what the hell it is all about. We are a tiny dot in
this gigantic universe, perhaps like a single grain of sand on the beach. Our
planet is a fragile gift, but unfortunately one that we continually mismanage,
randomly abuse and fight over.
This morning while perhaps dwelling too much
upon all the worldly chaos, I got tremendous solace from watching the tide
coming in ~ one of nature's constants that we (hopefully) cannot change.
