The sands of time only run one way which is something humans ignore.
Yesterday in The National (Scotland) and The Guardian (England) this letter of mine was published -
Dear Editor,
As the usual tragic civilian casualties pile up under rubble, including 60 little girls blown to bits in a school in Tehran, the world faces perhaps its greatest irony.
Trump has illegally initiated a war that has no congressional approval while calling on the people of Iran to rise up - in part because of the abuse of its own citizens.
No one would argue that Iran hasn't committed atrocities against its people but this from a regime that has its own masked thugs murdering people in broad daylight on the streets of US cities and 'disappearing' them into camps.
Is there another country on the planet that needs 'regime change' more than The US?
*
And this was hot on the heels of another letter that went like this -
Dear Editor,
There are many works of fiction that echo or pre-empt real events to the point that their prescience is unnerving.
At the moment I struggle to not chew over Stephen King’s ‘The Dead Zone’.
In the film version of this sci-fi thriller, the actions of the psychic school teacher John Smith, played by screen favourite, Christopher Walken, saves the day although not in the way he imagines.
The lunatic right-wing populist politician Greg Stillson, perfectly captured by Martin Sheen, is a one-man wrecking machine whose rise to the top is so eerily Trump-parallel, it gives me goose bumps.
President Greg Stillson (Sheen) in a mad midnight craze – is future-seen by the psychic to press the nuclear button in his catastrophic, self-obsessed, if-I-go-everyone-goes narcissistic, sociopathic literal end game.
Just as Trump is now ramping up wars and conflicts both within the US and around the world, simply to cover his vast and incalculable failures and corruption actions, so did Greg Stillson.
Many Western politicians and even more folk in the media continue to behave as if there is something normal about /workable around this US administration. But I see no John Smith/Christopher Walken to save the day…
*
Since that letter was published, Trump has started his war, egged on by Netanyahu (Israel of course a state with nukes, albeit outside of any international agreement) and according to sources in the US, the Saudi Crown Prince – Prince ‘Bone Saw’ – he of the brutal murder and dismemberment of American Journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
This is further monstrous distraction from the infamous Epstein Files.
But over-arching all this seems to be the unspoken assumption that some repair will magically happen in the future. Trump will leave office (!) or – eventually die…
This is not the fix people think it is.
Situations do not revert to what they were before a cataclysm. No landscape looks the same after a landslide or earthquake or volcano.
A new situation exists based on the trauma that has happened.
Add to that the cumulative trauma that our fragile planet is subject to on a daily basis and even the fabled ‘rebuilding’ cannot possibly, logically, realistically ‘take us back’.
The world will move forward with the baggage, destruction and more limited resources. We will not be in a post WWI or post WWII situation. We have deliberately destroyed so much of the ‘gains’ of those horrific sacrifices and those lessons learnt were not just forgotten but trampled underfoot after mere decades.
The sands of time move in one direction and they run out…
Do check this out… Zero One Zero Two