Things Fall Apart
BY CLARENCE BARR, II
I never thought I would say this, but I’m really beginning to regret ever having children. Not because it hasn’t been a fulfilling experience. I just hate the fact that I brought them into a world that seems to be quickly unraveling.
I mean when you have kids the main thing you want to do is keep them safe and healthy. You imagine them growing up to live out their dreams and having a better life than your own. But as I look at the condition of this planet right now, I’m not sure if that’s necessarily going to be the case.
Between the never ending onslaught of religious radicals violently acting upon their beliefs, climate change causing the environment to become increasingly hostile, the ecosystem being destroyed and contaminated by harmful pesticides, radioactive debris and waste poisoning the oceans, rapidly depleting natural resources and man-made viruses, like the newly discovered Zika, continuously being introduced into the human populace as part of a strategy to control population growth, for the first time in my life I actually feel sorry for what the next generations will have to inherit in the next 35-50 years. That is mainly because, while many of us won’t be around to see how all of this craziness turns out, the ones who come behind us will.
The worse part of it all is that the individuals most responsible for ruining this God-given paradise, that we’ve called home for thousands of years, are desperately trying to find an escape route. I guess laying waste to this planet wasn’t good enough. Now they want to take their recipe for ruin onto the interstellar highway.
Of course there is always hope that we can, somehow, turn things around and prevent this seemingly inevitable collapse of civilization from occurring. But, if we don’t, I believe that those of us who sat by and watched it all fall apart from a distance owe our children and grandchildren a sincere apology for dragging them into mess that they didn’t play any part in creating.
Reality On Ice is © by the Florida Sentinel Bulletin Publishing Company. Anyone wishing to contact Clarence Barr can email him at: realityonice@yahoo.com.
