Today began with a beautiful tropical sunrise and then a trip to the beach to watch the wind, waves, birds and surfers ...
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Seems like Florida's panhandle will get soaked. Tropical storms are mostly harmless. Georgia needs the rain, too.
This world is filled with a nearly infinite supply of unhappy, angry, confused people. Since the election of Barack Obama a lot of these people have come out of the woodwork like roaches woken up from their slumber. Fortunately these people are essentially powerless and demographically they face a very bleak future.
Thank God for demographics. These unfortunate people filled with irrational anger, prejudice, xenophobia and warmongering desires represent a very dismal period in human history.
These people are relics of the old European mindset which fuelled all of the crimes committed by Europeans against everyone else on the globe, including each other (1600 - 1945, the second European dark age). Hundreds of millions of people died during the era in which Europeans owned the entire globe. Over 90% of the native populations of the New World were lost to genocide and disease. Europeans went so far as to even burn an entire civilization's books in their attempt to thorough eradicate the native cultures and religions.
Sadly enough, the people who committed all of these crimes were my own ancestors and probably yours, too. Don't believe the patriotic myth regarding the righteousness and intrinsic goodness of the United States of America. From the beginning the Americans were violent and they remain so to this day. Hardly a day goes by without America committing some crime or atrocity.
I have heard so many times, "America is the greatest nation that has ever existed! USA! USA!"
This is a myth and a lie. The United States of America is the luckiest nation to live on this Earth. We stole an entire pristine resource-rich continent by genocide from the Native Americans and by war from the Mexicans. When humankind went insane in global wars during the 20th century, America was just lucky that the technology of that era precluded a direct attack upon the country by our enemies across the ocean. The Atlantic and Pacific served as a protective moat.
While Europe and Asia died, America thrived.
America was doubly lucky, too. As the world recovered from humankind's attempt to exterminate itself by warfare the Soviets and Chinese took what was, essentially, a povery vow on behalf of idealism (socialism). For that reason America had access to an entire planet's worth of resources at the lowest possible price without competition from economically equivalent superpowers.
Had the Soviets and Chinese adopted capitalism back in the 1940's this world would have run out of resources decades ago. Now that the Russians and Chinese and Indians have adopted capitalism, our world is quickly running out of resources right now.
America has a bleak future. Humankind has a bleak future.
But the sun keeps shining and Nature keeps on living and that is all that matters.
David Mathews
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