Do We Really Learn from our Mistakes?

Years ago, I read that the military expenditures of the world for a single year would be sufficient to provide clean and safe drinking water for the whole world's people - for the future as well as the present.

Now, I read that…
Between now and 2030 the average annual cost of combating global climate change will cost about 1.6% of global GDP. This is not an insignificant investment, but it is less than two-thirds of global military spending.

And so the story goes on.

We spend huge amounts of money to protect our privilege from others by force and in doing so contribute to our own downfall through a professed inability to 'afford' to combat a known disaster in the making.

And that disaster affects all the world's people - ourselves but especially those who are the most marginal and vulnerable.
When they come knocking at our door to say "let us in, for you have made our homes places we can no longer live", what will our response be?
I suspect it will be the same denial as for climate change itself, that we 'cannot afford' to help.

What then will our response be when they knock harder, with force, or are set to overwhelm us with sheer numbers?
On past performance, it will be to arm against them…to protect our way of life.

Oh, but perhaps we might have thought to to protect our way of life earlier and more constructively, by making small concessions to allow others to continue their way of life.

Love, Hate and Destruction

Today is St Valentine's Day with all its connotations of love. How sad, then, that it is also the anniversary of the fatwah on Salman Rushdie. I have never read the Satanic Verses but I understand that the passages found so offensive were actually part of a nightmare experienced by one of the characters so could equally be interpreted as being anathema to that character and by extension to the author.

But once the battle lines are drawn so clearly they become more than lines in the sand and cannot be brushed away or washed away as the tides do to our castles on the beach.

But even those things we so cherish that we must see them as indestructible will fall, one day, to the elements. And in doing so they will support new life. The question for us is do we want that new life to include mankind, for surely the way we are going right now suggests the world would be better without us.