Stop the World! I want to get off...

Do you ever feel, like me, a sense of growing despair at the state of our world in this the 21st century? The sentiment expressed in the somewhat humorous title of this post is meant to convey this sense of ‘fed-upness’ with the present state of the world that we humans have forged. We have somehow created a world seething with conflict, war and strife on all sides? If only the world were like a fairground carousel from which we could jump off at any time! I myself grew up in a time when we were made to believe that, having emerged from a massively destructive global conflict and the dark days that followed it, society and the world in general were gradually becoming a better place by the day in every way and that it would continue to get better until we attained some sort of earthly utopia or Nirvana. We were not, of course, given a time-frame for this, but there seemed little doubt that it would come to pass one day.

But that’s not happening, is it? Not even remotely. There’s precious little peace or harmony in the world today and danger seems to lurk round every corner. All over the planet earth, one country or people is dumping on another country or people. One nation or cultural community is clashing with another. The apparent cause may be territorial, political, economic or religious. It hardly matters. An excuse or pretext for aggression or hostilities towards one’s fellow men can always be found. And once found, the business of making war or launching homicidal attacks can begin in the name of Jesus, God, Allah, or some other suitable deity, holy figure or to-die-for cause, with a clear conscience.


If it's a war waged by Muslims against the Infidel (nowadays that's us in the West), it will inevitably be a holy war or crusade, in the name of Allah and all Islam. It would seem that Allah, the All Merciful, is quite happy to see women, children and innocent people in general being slaughtered in His name by such devotees as suicide bombers, providing it’s proclaimed a holy war. So that's alright then. So much more reassuring to know that one might receive a holy bullet in the head or be blown up by a holy bomb than by one of your common-or-garden bullets or bombs. The reality, of course, is that there's nothing holy about any war, whether it's waged by Muslims, Christians or the followers of any other religion, and one could not imagine either the God of Abraham or the God of Mohammed sanctioning such carnage in His name. War is wrong whoever practises it, its outcome consumes many lives and causes untold misery and visits the participants with destruction and devastation.

If it’s not human beings butchering each other in the name of their god or other ideal, it’s a natural disaster: it’s a flood that sweeps away people and their homes, a tsunami that swamps the land and bulldozes everything in its path, an earthquake that demolishes villages and towns, a volcano that disgorges molten lava and spews out hot ash engulfing whole communities, a hurricane or cyclone, or some such phenomenon, that tears its way across the landscape carrying all before it, torrential rains that transform huge swathes of land into lakes, months of drought that parch the ground and turn it into a dust-bowl, and so on and so forth.


And of course we mustn’t forget the threat posed by contagion when it becomes an epidemic and then spreads across national borders to develop into a full-blown pandemic, killing thousands of people as it extends its reach. Suddenly there’s an outbreak of some life-threatening infection in one country and within days or weeks it’s spreading from country to country, sowing fear and panic in its path round the globe. Before you know it, it’s arrived on your doorstep and emergency action is being taken by the local authorities to check it and to immunise the population against it. Usually too little and too late.

You would think that with so many natural disasters and calamities occurring throughout the world, that would be more than enough for us. But you’d be wrong. We feel compelled to add to the sum-total of our miseries and misfortunes by serving a dose of our own man-made woes just to be sure there’s enough sorrow and grief in the world to go round. So, those few pockets on our planet which have relatively few natural calamities often have local nationalist movements busy planting bombs in public places designed to kill en masse and indiscriminately. A sense of injustice or desire for regional autonomy or even independence seems to excuse nowadays any act of mass murder of innocent people, as they go about their day-to-day business, to make its point.


We often brand someone an ‘animal’ to indicate that their behaviour is unworthy of a human being or we might say that a riotous mob behaved like animals to signify that they ran riot or behaved in a savage manner. And yet this is the last thing that animals actually do. Animals very seldom kill for sport, but for food. Humans kill for sport and out of sheer spite and revenge. Animals rarely go on a rampage of destruction. The history of humans is full of countless acts of looting and rioting. Animals are not known to indulge in serial or mass killings, humans do it with alarming frequency. Need I go on? In fact, when we want to describe wanton and unacceptable conduct of any kind we should say that we’re behaving like humans! Because we are the savages, not animals. We are the species that kills and slaughters and pollutes and destroys on a large and systematic scale and are a threat to ALL other species of life on this planet and to our very environment. Animals live in harmony with their environment, whereas we are antagonistic to it and are constantly harming it.

We humans have made a very complex place of the world. Unless you are prepared to take yourself off to some exceedingly remote and hostile location and live in a cave or hut, cut off from society, you cannot escape this all-pervasive complexity. Today human society is more complex than ever before. Our technology and our scientific inventions, which are meant to assist and support us, add to this complexity as they become ever more sophisticated. It is difficult to really keep up with anything these days. Innovation and invention means that no sooner have we familiarised ourselves with one weird and wonderful device or gadget, than a new one comes along to replace it. Not because it has outlived its use or is outdated, but simply because the policy of ‘planned obsolescence’ dictates that products must be constantly renewed and given a face-lift to keep the relentless wheels of capitalist enterprise turning.


We are a wasteful, voracious, destructive and lethal breed and bad news for the environment and all other animals on this planet, and we consume vast quantities of the Earth’s resources to sustain our ever-growing numbers and maintain our prodigal way of life. When God went one step further than the apes to create humans, was it possible that he did not know what He was unleashing on the planet? How could this be, given that God is prescient and omniscient? Could it be that he knew and did it anyway? Perhaps He foresaw that without man the earth would be a very boring place, with no bloody wars, savage conflicts, genocidal massacres or social unrest, just peace and harmony all around. It seems that even God needs a bit of excitement in his celestial existence and so He created mankind, and I’m sure we’ve never disappointed him since!

Life and All That

I thought for a change I would write about something straightforward which I could just sail through and not have to think too hard about. So I drew up a shortlist of two topics: LIFE and the UNIVERSE. As I couldn't make up my mind between them, I tossed a coin and it came up heads, which was 'life'. So there you have it, 'life' it is.

So let's jump in at the deep end and ask the question: what is this condition we call 'life'? I mean, what is it? Well, frankly it's anyone's guess! But whatever it is, one thing’s for certain: we cling onto it for dear... life! Well, we would wouldn’t we? And another thing: without it, there is NOTHING else. Whatever the precise nature of the condition, it is a PRECONDITION for every other condition.

And it doesn’t have to be good and pleasurable for us to want it and want to hang on to it. It can be bad as bad can be, but we still want to keep it. Essentially, it is the Operating System on which all our programs sit, and if our OS conks out, our computer stops working. But unlike a computer, there’s no fixing our OS once it has broken down.

All of us (well, almost all of us) want to live and to live for as long as we can. It makes no odds if we’re old as Methuselah, chronically ill, or intensely unhappy, we still desperately hang on to life for the sake of ... hanging on to life. And we do it because we cannot entertain the thought of our own inexistence, though we know it must surely come one day. It's just too frightening to contemplate.

The state that we call life is different from anything else. Once lost, for whatever reason, it cannot be recovered. It cannot be re-activated, re-generated, or restored to working order. It is a one-off, a one-way ticket, a journey with the same destination for all of us. But, unlike other destinations, it is one which we do not want to arrive at, ever, as it’s a destination from which there is no return. It is literally the end of the road... for all of us, with no exceptions. And... that's more than enough clichés for one paragraph!

In the general scheme of thing, Nature has been unkind to us. The mind does not seem to age in tandem with the body. Our body wilts and withers inside and out. Our skin wrinkles and our hair falls out. Everything slows down and we become frailer and more fragile. We are often plagued by age-related illnesses and disabilities. And yet mentally we see ourselves as younger, it’s as if we’re stuck in a time warp. We may be in our nineties or a hundred plus but we’re not ready to die, we’re not psychologically prepared. We may believe in God and heaven and the whole package but we’re not ready to meet our Maker or dwell in paradise (assuming of course we’re not going to that other place!).

I have seen television programmes about people with monstrous deformities, severe disabilities, awful impoverished lives and nightmarish living conditions, and yet they all earnestly wish to carry on living and fear death. Their lives are full of suffering, physical and mental, their prospects dismal and depressing, but they cling to life and all the grief and hardship it offers them rather than envisage the finality of the alternative. In their position, would we who are more fortunate think and behave differently? Would we opt out of life before our time? Would you?

The reality is that we are all on this earth for but a short time. Some of us are blessed with a relatively long life (at least in human terms) and some of us are cursed with a life cut short by accident or illness, but both are infinitely short in cosmic terms. There’s usually not much we can do about this, barring suicide, and so we really only have one realistic option: to make the best of it while we can and avoid needless regrets in later life. The Latin expression carpe diem (seize the day), which nowadays is heard almost ad nauseam (another Latin saying), even from the lips of the relatively illiterate, is as true now as it’s ever been. Amen.

New Worlds

Planets, stars, galaxies, nebulas and supernovae are some of the bodies that populate the depths of space and that may harbour worlds unseen and unimagined by us with civilisations equal to or greater than our own. Perhaps we will find out one day and perhaps, more likely, we never will.

The likelihood is that we shall already have destroyed ourselves, if not the planet, with our constant depredations and rapacious exploitation of the Earth, and with sheer overpopulation by the human species and its consequent demands for resources that the planet will no longer be able to provide to the teeming billions of humans.

Perhaps our salvation lies in space travel, which might enable the human race to spread out across space, populating other planets and easing the pressure on the Earth, seeing as we are not doing very well at limiting the proliferation of humans on a naturally finite planet. But to achieve this, it will probably have to be on a galactic level, since we have already seen that no planet in our solar system other than the Earth can sustain human life. We shall have to journey much further afield than our humble corner of the universe, to distant star systems in search of worlds not inimical to human survival like our group of planets that are as hostile as can be to sentient life.

And talking of the Earth, here it is. The Blue Planet, as we have christened it. Our home in the vastness of Space and most likely the only habitable planet for many light-years' distance. Mostly covered in water, which we cannot drink, but teeming with life forms and which supplies us with seemingly limitless food of one kind or another, it is the only thing we have at present, our only habitat for many years to come. And yet we treat it so harshly and so cavalierly, and now it may have begun to repay us in the currency we richly deserve, with natural phenomena that are capable of sweeping away hundreds or thousands of people at a stroke.