Where are we going?

The World we live in

It is not unusual for people to analyze the state of the world in their generation – and to find it in a state of troubling change. The difference today is that the change is happening faster than ever before in human history.

Where are we going?

The World we live in

It is not unusual for people to analyze the state of the world in their generation – and to find it in a state of troubling change. The difference today is that the change is happening faster than ever before in human history.

First of all, what is happening?

The Obesity Explosion

I went to the hospital today. I needed a pre-op meeting for my upcoming prostate operation. As I sat in the waiting room I was surrounded by people who were either overweight (BMI >25) or obese (BMI >30). I felt like such a skinny twerp sitting there.

Then on came the hospital staff. Fully half of them were also either overweight or obese. Fortunately, the other half of the staff seemed to be able to control their weight. They were mostly the young ones. May they persevere in their good habits.

Pondering this, I felt so sorry for the surgeons who would have to operate on these people. This surely must make their work more difficult – and more disagreeable.

As noted in another blog article, all of this foretells an oncoming health services disaster – maybe even a total societal collapse, unless the growing obesity epidemic is brought under control.

What to do about an unbalanced president? Post script

As usual, it is not enough to rail against the ills of the world. In addition, we need to point to possible solutions. The following has been suggested to me by a colleague.

What to do with an unbalanced president?

The evidence is so overwhelming that we are becoming inured to it. President Trump’s erratic behaviour is becoming the new normal. We poor souls, bewildered by it all, hardly know how to react anymore.

He lies and he flip flops on his story about Russia. First he knew nothing about Russia. Later he knows Russia well. Then he has never met Putin. Then later he admits that he did meet him (at a beauty pageant in Russia). This behaviour is all captured on video. However, all of this recorded evidence does not seem to phase Donald Trump, nor his ardent followers.

He has made outlandish claims about himself, and he has done it so often that we hardly know how to respond.

The hazards of learning a new language

Learning a new language can be a wonderful experience. It refreshes and challenges the mind. With perseverance it eventually can be a gateway to meeting new friends. Finally, after much effort, it enables one to enter the deep thinking of another culture. As Charlemagne is reputed to have said, “Avoir une autre langue, c’est posséder une deuxième âme”. (To have another language is to possess a second soul.)

How can one practice non-violence?

In 1965 when I was studying Humanities at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Martin Luther King came to speak to the student body. The civil rights movement was then at its height in the southern United States. There was not a room big enough to hold the student crowd, so King spoke to thousands of students in an open air meeting.

At the end of his talk King made a call for volunteers to go to work in the south, doing civil rights activities. About 25 of us responded. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded by Martin Luther King, was a non violent movement. We volunteers received two days of training in non violent resistance methods. We were told that if attacked we should not fight back, but instead we should adopt a non violent position. In the worst case scenario, we were to curl up and take up a fetal position and refuse to fight back.

Child Soldiers Can Teach Us Something

Here in Canada we have two child soldiers in our midst. Both have written up their stories in books; “If My life as a Child Soldier Could Be Told “by Junior Nzita and “War Child; A Child Soldier’s Story” by Emmanuel Jal.

Junior Nzita (left) and Emmanuel Jal

Both of these young men have undergone horrific experiences in their youth. They were forcefully taken from their home settings and given a choice – “Learn to kill others or you yourself will be killed!” Their recorded stories tell of unimaginable atrocities. They lived through horrors that no child should ever experience.  Emmanuel’s experience began at the age of seven years old in South Sudan and Junior’s at the age of 12 years old in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.