I think it would be reasonable to state that we are living at the most intensely challenging period in the history of mankind.

I have no doubt too that every generation in history has felt the same thing. Every generation, after all, has had its end times adherents. Some quote the book of Revelation. Some quote Edgar Cayce. Others quote Nostradamus. Looking at what is happening around you and drawing from it the conclusion that the world is going to hell in a handbasket has been par for the course for aeons.

This time round you could be forgiven for getting caught up in the enthusiasm for the concept, though.

After all look at what we have happening to us and to the world.

In no particular order of importance we have a whole heap of nasties to keep us entertaining each other with Cassandra like predictions:

Let’s start with Global Warming. That is the one on everyone’s lips. Except for the sceptics. They think that the whole thing is bad science. But it gets more interesting as you peel off the layers of the onion. It appears that global warming is actually not happening as fast as it could because of particulate pollution. (That is the pollution that you get from the various pollutants that come out of airplanes, cars, power stations, factories etc). Particulate pollution causes what is called Global Dimming. It causes smaller droplets of moisture to be created in the atmosphere and it also tends to reflect the sun’s light back into space.

After 9/11 during the week or so when there were no flights the skies brightened considerably and it got warmer in the US. It appears from the climate modelling that has been done since then that has taken into account the effect of global dimming that if we really stopped polluting the atmosphere the effect of CO2 pollution would actually be much more severe than it is. So now we are caught in the double-whammy that effectively says that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

So that is the first big issue to get depressed about.

Then there is the prospect of war. Back in the late 90’s the CIA released a public report that predicted the future. I will grant you that when the CIA tells you anything, you first have to pinch yourself to make sure that you are awake. Then you have to ask yourself what the hidden agenda might be. So in the spirit of that kind of cynicism how would you respond to a report from the CIA that forecasts that there will be wars fought in the world over fresh water? Ten years on from the issue of that report we are in the midst of a global fresh water shortage. There are droughts in Australia, there are droughts in China, and the US.

Ironically there are no wars being fought over water yet. Perhaps it is because there are wars being fought over a lot of other things…. Like energy for instance, or drugs, or land. Good old traditional reasons to kill your neighbour and cause another generation of hatred and vendetta to be heaped onto all the previous generations of hatred.

So that gives us the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the wars in Africa, the war in the Caucasus. There isn’t any shortage of wars. And the countries that are pushing to fight them don’t seem to understand that in every country that exists on the planet are people who are quite peace loving until you start lobbing bombs at them. Then for some reason they become quite angry and start doing quite anti-social things back again. And now in this age of peer to peer communication it isn’t just the corporate media that provides the insight into the rationale for fighting your neighbour. Now anyone who has a connection to the internet is just as likely to receive an email from a friend that provides an insight into why there is fighting that is precisely 180 degrees in the opposite direction to the information that is in the corporate mainstream media. It’s not a matter of “who do you believe?”. It’s a matter of, “I don’t trust any of the lying goons that were elected to run (insert country name here)”.

The truth of the matter is that all the politicians lie, or at minimum masquerade behind a tissue of lies, in order to do what is increasingly hard to achieve – control the populace.

And while we are on the big ticket items, there is the economy. Bill Clinton famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid”. And he was right. The global economy is crumbling before our very eyes.  It didn’t start with subprime. It started a long way before that. But subprime became the poster child for the excess of Wall Street and the greed of the banking class. We don’t need to understand how derivatives work to know that derivatives made a few people into billionaires and a lot more homeless.

These of course are just a few of the things that we are facing right now. These are the stories that are on the front pages of the newspapers. And these are the things that are frankly designed to make us fearful in order for the powers that be to keep things – and us – under control.

They reckon that these topics are ones that they can pretend that they have a solution for. And if they can convince us that there is a solution, for the most part we will keep relatively calm and peaceful and behave ourselves.

But the problem is that society as we know it is starting to come apart at the seams.

And most of us just don’t know how bad it is already, let alone how bad it is going to get.  

More tomorrow