America and the rest of the world are
in a confluence of events that are causing widespread anxiety and fear. The
Connecticut massacre is just one, isolated example.
It is being reported
that the killer's mother was as mentally unstable as her son. A report in the
British daily, the Mail, said "Friends and family portrayed Adam Lanza's mother
Nancy as a paranoid 'survivalist' who believed the world was on the verge of
violent, economic collapse" who had been "stockpiling food, water, and guns in
the large home she shared with her 20-year-old son in Connecticut."
Why Adam Lanza decided to kill children and staff will never be
known, but it fits into a larger picture of the widespread fears surging over
the planet like winds of doom. The tens of thousands of Syrian civil war victims
are too great a number to grasp, but twenty children and six teachers and staff
is.
We view the world through the prism of our own life experiences and
the young among us have considerably less on which to draw in terms of
understanding a world that appears to be — and is — a dangerous place where our
freedoms and our lives are seen to be in imminent danger.
On Friday,
December 21, millions around the world will await the fulfillment of a Mayan
prediction that it will come to an end. When one considers that the end came
long ago for the Mayan civilization, there is some irony in this, but it is
testimony to the many end-of-the-world predictions that are embedded in
religions that billions adhere to and believe.
There are Bible stories
such as Noah's flood preparations to avoid an angry God's decision to start over
again or with the story of Armageddon. When the first atomic bomb tests were
successful, Robert Oppenheimer, one of its creators reportedly said, "I have
become Shiva," the god of death and the destroyer of worlds from the Hindu holy
book, the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at
once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty
one."
It was an apt quote because mankind has arrived at a point where
nuclear weapons can kill millions. In the back of our minds, we all worry that
Iran, a nation ruled by fanatical Muslims who believe that widespread death and
destruction is necessary to bring about the return of a mythical Twelfth Imam
and the rule of Islam over the world. These leaders regard the U.S. as "the
great Satan" and Israel as the "Little Satan." Irrationality has never been a
deterrent to war and, in the last century, we witnessed two world wars and many
lesser ones that arose from the human instinct to conquer and kill.
It is
noteworthy that the Iranians and other Muslims adamantly deny the Nazi Holocaust
that systematically killed six million Jews in Europe during World War II. The
resurrection of the state of Israel is one of the true miracles of modern times
after the passage of two thousand years.
The prospects for avoiding a
Middle East cataclysm are growing slimmer as the Obama administration has hued
closely to the belief — disproven throughout history — that one can resolve such
outcomes by
talking to one's enemies, even those who have openly stated
their wish to kill us. In a world filled with nations in the grip of despots —
often elected to office — this is wishful thinking to the point of national
suicide.
Then, too, since the 1980s the world has been assailed by the
greatest hoax, global warming claiming the destruction of all life on Earth due
to the rise of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. It has been rising
although it remains a trace gas, barely 0.038%, but the Earth has been in a
natural cooling cycle for the past sixteen years and shows no evidence of
warming, nor ever could be affected by CO2 which plays no role in climate
change. What does? The Sun.
Religious zealots have been joined in recent
times by a new priesthood, the many scientists who have been predicting the end
of mankind. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who worked closely with the
current science advisor to the President, John Holdren, predicted that "The
battle to feed all over humanity is over." He predicted that millions would die.
They didn't.
The Bulletin of the Atomic scientists moved its Doomsday
Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, saying "The global
community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe
from changes in Earth's atmosphere." Rubbish! The Earth's climate has gone
through many epochs that were filled with catastrophes, including Ice Ages and
magnetic reversals that brought with them mass extinctions of
species.
The classic Bible story in Revelation depicts the Four Horseman,
conquest, war, disease and death. Despite these, the world population quadrupled
in the 20th century, given improved agricultural advances in seeds, fertilizers,
pesticides, transport, and irrigation. Even so, we're told that family size
continues to shrink on every continent, despite predictions that it will top out
at around nine billion by 2050. But they are only predictions, much like the
Mayan calendar prediction.
Lastly, for Americans, there is the prospect
of debt that could render the dollar useless and yet we continue to see Congress
relentlessly borrowing and spending more money than the economy can possibly
sustain; $4.8 billion is borrowed every day. All good and bad things come to an
end if prudence and good governance is not exercised.
All this has long
been known. In 55 BC, the Roman philosopher, Marcus Tillius Cicero, said "The
budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should
be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and
the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt.
People must again learn to work, instead of living on public
assistance."
Finally, America is as deeply divided among its citizens as
it has ever been since 1861 when it engaged in a Civil War that killed a tenth
of its population. A nation this divided has little hope to sustain itself,
especially when one half of the population is heavily taxed to sustain the other
half that ops to live on government handouts.
A random, senseless act of
violence such as occurred in Newtown, Connecticut, only exacerbates our fears.
There are, however, far greater things to fear — real, not imaginary — and
individually we feel helpless to avert them.
The killings in Colorado and at Sandy Hook school were committed by
certifiably insane individuals. No background check can determine a person's
sanity. If seeking the advice and care of a psychiatrist and psychologist would
disqualify a person from gun ownership than their privacy will have been invaded
in ways prohibited by medical ethics and the constitutional right to privacy.
Police cannot arrest anyone on the suspicion they're nuts. The only protection
against them is a sane armed gun-owner.
I suspect that the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1941, the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt said "will live in
infamy" is ancient history to several recent generations of Americans, many of
whom are the aging baby boomers, the children born after our troops returned
home, married, and began to raise families after 1945, the year World War II
ended.
Men lined up to enlist to fight World War II. They volunteered in
the thousands because they understood the threat to freedom the regimes of the
Nazis and the Japanese Empire represented. Similarly, after 9/11 there was a
surge of enlistments to fight the rising tide of Islamic aggression.
I can't escape the feeling, though, that other than the horror of an
Iranian nuclear missile blowing up Israel and killing its citizens (both Jewish
and Muslim), that most Americans are not that committed to its survival. I
suspect that most Europeans are even less committed.
In a column on Tuesday, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens
perfectly anticipated Obama's lies. Under the headline, "To
the Wavering Voter" it repudiated the Obama campaigns assertions about a
totally bogus "war on women" saying, "No, abortion rights and access to
contraception will not be jeopardized if Mitt Romney becomes president. Not
remotely, not vaguely, not even close."
Most Americans cannot even imagine living in such places, but most
Americans have not lived in nations where Islam, an inherently oppressive faith
system, is the rule and where often secular despots enforce it to their personal
gain.
