MAGA: MAKE AMERICA GRIEVE AGAIN.
Matthew 24 calling.
Color me nervous. Even more than that: color me alarmed. Even more than that: color me frightened, afraid of Climate Change causing food shortages, afraid of nuclear wars, ending in our total annihilation.
It’s not that we lack warning. Jesus’ contemporaries were also busy with earth’s final conditions. Seeing a true prophet in Jesus, his disciples asked him for signs of ‘the end of the age’, meaning not only the end of the Roman occupation, but also the return of the good times as in the unspoiled Garden of Eden. Matthew 24 records this, as a warning to us, 2,000 years and some 70 billion people later, those born between then and today.
Jesus answered: “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.”
Sorry, Jesus, but I am alarmed: it seems to me, that the ‘birth pains’ have now started in earnest, and the time for ‘grieving’ has begun.
We now are descending into a burst of war madness that reminds me of Jesus’ words, and that at the very time when Global Heating endangers crops everywhere. Nothing, however, accelerates CO2 formation more than the destructive consequences of war. Wars kill more than people: they kill all that lives: soil, air, water, relationships, family ties, justice, laws.
Wars have no winners.
Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of Great Nations, touched an especially raw nerve when it came to the United States by suggesting (albeit with great care and with all sorts of qualification) that however powerful the US is, this did not necessarily guarantee it a dominant position in the international system forever. That’s happening now: the exact opposite of MAGA, “Making it Great Again”. The Trump slogan resembles more: “Making America Grieve Again”.
The USA is already a loser in healthcare, in social benefits, in longevity, in wealth inequity. Raised on the idea that the United States was an exceptional country with an enormous capacity for inventing and reinventing itself, in many respects, America has become a disadvantaged nation. Prof. Paul Kennedy’s argument that the United States might not be able to escape one of the most basic laws of world history went down rather badly in a nation that had become accustomed to being number one. No longer true, and Trump is accelerating this process.
Why do we have wars today?
Simple: the world is running out of basic resources such as wood, arable land, clean water, yes oil and coal, exacerbated by Global Warming. The easy to obtain raw materials has been exploited first: now comes the hard part! War economies, actually, speed up this disintegration process.
Why do we have this rush to destroy? Why this built-in death-wish?
In a sense, it is perfectly normal. Consumer economies are rare in history; military economies are the rule. The Roman Empire remains a good example. It is well known that most Empires tend to collapse as a result of overspending on their military. It happened to the Soviet Union in 1989. Every war is also a war on nature, on biodiversity, and on the climate. Today these many wars are driving us to global climate global destruction. Military Emissions means Humanity will not survive war.
Wars and rumors of war. The USA has a very poor record in its waging of wars since the conclusion of World War II: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, are still fresh in peoples’ minds. Will Iran be next? Wars always cause a lot of grief, grief for lost relatives, grief for destroyed structures, lost innocence, lost natural and artistic treasures.
Wars and Rumors of War.
Yes, even the Rumors of War drive up pollution, as war production always has a negative influence on overall global wellbeing. It temporarily provides jobs, but even that is now limited, as the manufacturing of capital products, such as tanks and airplanes, is being replaced with masses of drones and anti-air attack- devices, easy to produce.
To me, surveying the global scene, I see little hope for peace, as the world also experiences “The Limits of Growth”, the End of Earth’s Abundance, the fights for the last of oil, for the last of arable land, now very much reduced because of rapidly increasing drought conditions.
Nevertheless, of all the wars, the war against Creation is the most dangerous: that’s why the Second Coming is at hand. Civilization started in the Middle East. Might it also end there? Then grief will be replaced with JOY!