The downfall of us

Sam Smith – Reading about the latest anti-human offenses by Vladimir Putin, I found myself saying, yeah, but he’s not as bad as Hitler. But then Hitler had to deal with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, while Putin only faces a future with leaders that include Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

Then Afghanistan came to mind. During some two decades of war, 176,000 Afghans were killed. Now under the Taliban 43% of Afghans have less than one meal a day. That’s about 16 million people

It all got me facing a fearsome truth: the country and the world  of positive inclination for much of my life has really turned around. I began counting the changes such as the new abortion clamp on women’s rights, the revival of open racism, the noisier war on immigration, and the antagonism to open and honest  education. Add to that those factors that we’ve never gotten a handle on, like environmental care. Or the decline of formally human, cooperative and decent relationships as our culture has become more urbanized and corporatized creating a society of individuals far less able to deal decently with others or with the ecology we share.

We have created a society in which individuals perceive their own rights and privileges as critically important with a stunning indifference to those of others. And the fact that those rights are considered superior to that of the environment  adds seriously to our crisis.

As the product of New Deal parents, a Quaker high school and the values of the 1960s, I am belatedly realizing how out of touch I am with the dominant values of our times which stand a reasonable chance of destroying not only the good values of humanity but humanity itself. As Santhosh Matthew, a professor of physics and astronomy  at Regis College said for the BBC:

As Abraham Loeb, professor of science at Harvard University and an astronomer who is searching for dead cosmic civilisations puts it, "the mark of intelligence is the ability to promote a better future.  If we continue to behave this way, we might not survive very long," he says. "On the other hand, our actions could be a source of pride for our descendants if they sustain a civilization intelligent enough to endure for many centuries to come."