The sad state of our world

What a sad world we are living in today! Hamas Arabs killing Jews and Jews killing Hamas Arabs on the Gaza Strip. Shiite Arabs killing Sunni Arabs in Iraq. The troubles still simmering in Lebanon. The Egyptian situation still not completely settled. Tribes in Afghanistan trying to impose ancient beliefs on a forward-looking government and in India, youths gang-raping young girls and then hanging them – as a punishment?

I could go on, naming numerous other situations, in Africa, South America, the Ukraine and Sri Lanka, virtually all of them resulting in the untimely deaths of innocent people, civilian people and children, completely unable to protect themselves and virtually none of them actually involved in any of what is going on. Even more sad, the majority of these awful troubles are due to religion, with only a small proportion due to political differences. To any civilised person, living in the more stable parts of the world, where religious differences are accepted and cause no friction, it is impossible to understand! Why can’t these factions enjoy their beliefs and allow other to enjoy theirs, without one wanting to wipe out the other. Surely the important thing, if one believes in religion, (which I do not), is that we should all end up at the right hand of whatever God is worshipped, irrespective of the path we each choose to get there. Or to take the argument further, if there is a God, then why does he permit all these different religions to exist – why not just one pathway, that we all follow?

But to come back down to a more earthly level of thought, the most worrying aspect of all the trouble going on in the world, is the fear that it may eventually spread from one of the existing hot-spots and encompass the whole world – for a third time! With the knowledge and the weaponry the world now possesses this would be tantamount to the end of civilisation, or even the human race and what would be the advantage in that. Though even I can see advantages for this tiny globe, if humans were no longer here, or had never been here, messing up what must, at one stage of its history, have been a paradise!

Ironically, I would estimate, purely without any proof to back me up, that all the problems of the world could be blamed on a tiny minority of the people who inhabit the place, maybe measurable in the hundreds! People who are, through religion or politics, crazy for personal power and/or wealth. Politically, Hitler would fall under this description – he and his original followers numbered very few in actual fact, but they happened to come on the scene at exactly the right time, when the German people were desperate for some sort of leadership, any sort of leadership, to renew their pride in themselves after the first world war. By the time they realised they had picked the wrong sort of person, it was too late – the Nazis were firmly in power!

One can list many others, just in recent history alone, who were much the same as Hitler in their own ways: Ayatollah Humeni, Sadam Hussein, Idi Amin, Gadaffi and possibly Putin, to name but a few, some of them political, some religious. But all with that secret personal power, to be able to sway others into joining them on their path to world domination. The whole of history is littered with these people too, we just hear more about the modern ones through the magic of electronic communications.

The great problem for the rest of us is one which has never been solved as yet. How do we find these people before they manage to go too far, and stop them in their tracks! It’s a problem for which I’m certainly not clever enough to find an answer, but it is one which needs to be tackled very soon, before it is too late for all of us!

Can we fix the world when it is so broken in so many ways? If you could bring peace to the world, how would you start? What is the solution? Share your thoughts in the comments below…