A recent opinion piece published on the BBC’s website sums it all up. The period following World War II up to the present is an anomaly. Stability is an anomaly, yes, that’s right.
In the context of history, the time we have lived in since the end of WWII is a blip, something that does not happen in humanity’s epic journey towards predicted extinction in a cataclysmic event somewhere down the line in a few thousand years.
The mass media have brought world events into our living rooms and people are following the struggles of Egypt and Libya. Over the past ten years, we also followed the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Reality shows bring the activities of anti-whaling ‘fighters’, while Greenpeace also grab our attention. But this is not real instability. Our grandfathers and grandmothers remember WWII. They remember the bombings with a sense of “Here we go again” after the stories of WWI, the Great War, the war to end all wars, which broke out in the second decade of the 20th Century. Before that, there was the Crimean War, the US Civil War, The War for Independence, the Hundred Years War; even. If we wanted to go the full Monty, we could talk about the Crusades, the Dark Ages of disease and pestilence, the Great Plague and the fall of the Roman Empire. Even Malta can go back to many periods of instability, including the time of war between the Ottomans and the Knights of St. John.
Today, we look at our economy with uncertainty, but even that has been seen before. The Great Depression of the 1930’s had many predecessors. In short, instead of obsessing about what the future holds for us, as the collective human race, we should appreciate what we have, and that is the longest period of calm that the world has ever seen.
Some obsess about the supposed end of days in 2012, as ‘predicted’ by the Mayans and their amazingly accurate calendars. Others obsess about diseases and outbreaks of modern plague. We all know how that ended – a massive bump in profits for the drug companies who rode on the back of the bird and swine flu ‘pandemics’.
Today we have access to medical care and we are ‘free’ to work for what we want and spend our money how we want to. A good portion of the world lives in democratic society and we do, to a degree, hold sway over what goes on in our respective countries of residence. So yes, these are exceptional times and we would do well to remind ourselves that our kids are not being shipped off to fight in wars; our children do not have to struggle to cling to dear life in their early years and for the most part, we can earn a decent income and go to sleep with a roof over our heads without fearing bandits. We truly should appreciate what we have, and work to conserve it, rather than hasten the next inevitable long period of strife. That period could come in 20 years or 200 or even 2,000 years. The fact of the matter is that proper strife will return to this little blue planet we call home.