As part of the ritual of growing up, I was introduced to Tom Lehrer in the 1950’s when I entered college. Over the years his satire, in verse and at the keyboard, has always stuck with me as a real, and unwavering, portrait of the world we live in. Enjoying the newspaper early this Saturday morning, I couldn’t help but recall one of his verses, that went something like this: “They’re rioting in Africa…they’re starving in Spain…the whole world is festering with unhappy souls…The French hate the Germans and the German hate the Poles…But I know that for certain, on some happy day, someone will set the bomb off, and we will be blown away!!” Although I don’t sanction the negativism, it does paint a picture of what is happening around the world today. “They’re rioting in Syria…they’re starving in North Korea…etc, etc! But, if one takes a stroll through history, it reveals the same pattern. Ghengiz, a Mongolian, rode into the area that is now know as Kazakhstan, killed all the men and impregnated all the women, essentially changing the blood lines of that area. Today, you can still see features of what that area’s inhabitants looked like prior to the arrival of the Mongols. One of his relatives, Timurlane, took an army to Sistan (southeastern Iran) and defeated the armies there by diverting the flow of a river that supplied water to his enemy. Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants in 218 BC and fought battles at the Rhone River. Egyptians raided into modern-day Georgia, in search of riches and little boys. The Brits held sway all over the globe by dispatching armies of conquest. So, in my amateurish approach to logic, it appears that our civilization has managed its evolvement through constant warfare. ?Verdad?
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 20:42:20 +0000
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