Why is it vastly easier, today, to conjure up visions of The Apocalypse than to imagine anything like utopia?  Why is it so difficult to even imagine a gradual improvement in the overall status of human kind, while it so easy to picture version after version of our demise?

 

We have invented so many ways to destroy ourselves as a species.   We may yet do ourselves in.

 

But in the meantime we seem to be plunging so deep into destroying the human world as we know it.

 

I have always prided myself on my “hope,” my ability to perceive a bright path in dark events, like the assassination of Chilean socialist president, Salvador Allende.  I have prided myself on holding onto a socialist vision:  a vision of a world in which resources are shared more equally and fairly among the earth’s inhabitants.  In which all work toward the common good.

 

That vision seems so far away now that I cannot deny my despair.

 

Oh, I know that there are many individual voices of peace:  People who have turned inward enough to know what’s there and who try, in their own ways, to encourage others on a similar path.   But I cannot honestly imagine this peace spreading far and wide enough to save us from those who control weapons, from the street bombers to the heads of nations.

 

Scary times.   Has it always felt this way for humanity?  Have we always been closer to the eve of destruction than a dawn of better times?

 

Perhaps we have.  I guess that’s some solace.