It's Two and a Half Minutes to Midnight

With all the political chess games playing out in the media and the persistent threat of nuclear war, is there any wonder that there’s this veil of hopelessness engulfing our society? Thanks to likes of Snowden and other whistle blowers, trust in the government has never been so absent as it is now. Not that we didn’t have our suspicions to begin with. Reports of corruption at the highest levels are rife. It’s only now that we’re more connected over the Internet that more is coming to light

People used to talk about conspiracies like they were the concoctions of paranoid tin-foil-hatters, but now a lot of those theories aren’t looking so crazy.

The financial system is so blatantly rigged to benefit those with already immense wealth. The poor are kept poor, not by misfortune, but by design. The main media outlets seem to serve one purpose: to divide. They pit race against race, orientation against orientation, class against class, women against men. It’s never ending. And when they’re not doing that, they’re keeping us in abject fear by bombarding us with death and destruction.

It’s hard to feel optimistic sometimes. Especially when we can perfectly visualise the utopia the planet could be.

Maybe it’s supposed to be this way. When you look back through history, were we ever really at peace? There’s always going to be someone who disagrees with someone else, someone who fights perceived injustices with more injustice. Maybe peace will never really be achieved until we’ve almost destroyed ourselves. Just like how it takes hitting rock bottom for some people to find the courage to change.

Sometimes I think that it’s not if nuclear war will break out, it’s when.

Currently, there are over 15000 nuclear weapons on earth, with Russia and the U.S sharing the vast majority. All it would take is one being fired –even mistakenly- to set off a catastrophic chain of events. It seems like a mathematical probability that something will happen eventually. So much so, they even moved the Doomsday lock half a minute closer to midnight. It’s almost becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point.

This is all just speculation of course. On the flip side there’s also a lot of good happening in the world. My personal favourites being the blockchain, the decentralisation of money and renewable, clean energy is gaining traction despite Trumps best efforts.

I guess like all of things, there’s a duality of good and bad that can exist at the same time. And maybe it will always be this way because without each other, can progress ever really be achieved?