Fiddling While Rome Burns

Someone seems to be living in a fantasy land, and is headed for big trouble. I won’t name names, but I suspect this person spends a lot of time reading and rereading Nicolai Gogol’s 1835 novella, and is actually morphing into an instance of Tarus Bulba, the main character in the book. You be the judge:

  

Reinforcing this speculation is an in-depth article I read this morning about the rewriting of history taking place and being spoon-fed to an unsuspecting, confused, or perhaps exhausted population:   http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/09/how-russia-revolutionizing-information-warfare/93635/?oref=defenseone_today_nl 

When I mentioned all of this to a friend of mine who is a psychiatrist, he suggested that his behavior might instead be associated with repressed urges related to his recent banning of homosexuality in the country. Well, his efforts might be better spent on dealing with the global environmental crisis that is about to make us all extinct. The last thing we need is another war that consumes vital and irreplaceable resources while further polluting the air we all breath with greenhouse gasses, smoke, and perhaps, radioactive particles.

 

Of course, the problems of ISIL and revolutions in the Middle East and Africa are creating more immediate problems with the environment, and these will not go away easily; especially if Israel and Iran get into a shooting war. Nothing good will come from these insurrections; they are extensions of conflicts that started millennia ago. And let’s not forget the Asia region. China is the poster child for bad decisions related to industrialization, and regional conflicts rooted in disputes that started centuries ago. It seems we never learn from our mistakes. And, the USA is not above the fray. We have so mismanaged the wonderful untouched landscape of North America that the entire midsection of the country has lost its topsoil, and we have polluted the great glacial lakes, and drained most of the underground aquifers of their precious potable water. Severe droughts are now promoting huge and sometimes uncontrollable fires that are ravaging the Western states of the country.

 

We are all equally guilty for allowing this to go on. We must demand of our governments worldwide that they quit fooling around with political and religious differences, and start bailing out the leaking boat of humanity. We have to be relentless in our demands because the consequences of “fiddling while Rome burns’ are final, and our coming and going as a species will be recorded as a minor layer in the geological record.