In the Middle East and parts of Africa we have people killing other people just because they don't follow the same religion - and some are now taking their war into Europe and have plans to spread even further. That both sides worship the same God makes it even more bizarre. We have a tidal wave of refugees and asylum seekers forced to flee this war in unseaworthy boats, people - men women and children - who are being forced to sleep in forests, in parks and on the side of the road with the onset of the freezing European winter not far off.
We have asylum seekers being locked up in prison camps because they haven't waited in a mythical queue to be processed. When you look at the refugee camps which have existed in some parts of the world since not long after the end of WW2, camps where generations of people have lived out their lives there, you can see why people might just lose patience and decide to take their chances with the people smugglers who prey on the vulnerable.
We have school girls being kidnapped in Africa and forcibly 'married' to their kidnappers and girls in other places being denied an education just because they are girls. In some parts of the world we have so-called 'honour killings' when a girl makes her own choice of marriage partner or chooses not to marry their partner at all. We have rapes, disfigurement and murders as punishment in some places and female genital mutilation 'to keep girls pure' in others.
Science has proven climate change is happening - and if we just look around us we are already living it. Where I live the climate has changed dramatically in my lifetime with the amount of rain decreasing and temperatures rising. We know the lowest lying parts of the planet will be most affected by the inevitable rise in sea levels but we still have no consensus or genuine, serious discussion on how to deal with this. Heads are being buried in the sand of ignorance or may be that should be are being stuck under the rising water. Trouble is neither of those options allow you to continue to breathe and I suspect that, if we continue not to act or make some contingency plans, the numbers of the displaced will make the current tide of refugees in Europe look like a trickle.
I could go on - the disastrous burning of the rain forest in parts of Asia, the clearing of the Amazonian rain forest, the rise in sea temperature and the effects of it and over fishing and so much more - but it's simply too depressing.
We're supposed to be the clever primates, aren't we. So why can't we just set our minds to solving these problems, which are all of our making? I don't know the answers but I do know if we don't find solutions to all these issues we are heading for possible extinction - and a lot sooner than we might like to think.
2 comments:
My one consolation is that I will personally be "extinct" before this happens. Your blog is depressing enough thanks Helen. We are learning, but slowly, but the religious fanatics are still out there. One thing I read, one volcano does a lot more damage than we do with our emissions and there is nothing we can do about that.
It is depressing, Jo, and, while we can't do anything about natural events, we don't need to make it worse. You're right, though, that change is happening. Not as quickly as it should but there is hope.
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