Running On Empty – Famine Taking It’s Toll
Not much in the American news about this, but it is one of the world’s largest humanitarian disasters in history unfolding right now.
There’s very little interest in Western nations to stories like this. The dead and dying go ignored so easily.
I just ate my lunch and looking at the left-overs, I wonder about how we all take food for granted so easily. There are millions of people that don’t.
The famine is caused by years-long drought, which is caused by climate change. Somalia’s inability to grow enough of its own food, poor economic conditions, internal strife and civil war, all combined with climate change is a disastrous situation. Pastoral subsistence living without rain has wiped out essential herds of animals, killing over 80% of the farm animals throughout the region.
Nobody dares mention religion, but this too is playing a large part in every disaster. Allah is not listening to the prayers of millions of starving people. Religion and the belief in divine intervention is magical thinking at its worst. I’ve seen endless numbers of posts online in foreign news sites claiming that God will intervene, and when he doesn’t, that is also God’s will. This sets up the perfect conditions for continued irresponsibility and indifference. It’s never our fault, we need do nothing.
Religion also practices guilt and coercion. The only way to please God is to obey. Suffering (and drought) is the result of disobedience. This sets up the perfect conditions for coercion on people who are already weakened. It’s an endless cycle of oppression and ignorance that keeps people chained to superstitions and fear. Their conditions will never improve when their minds remain enslaved because their bodies will only obey what their minds can convey. Religion teaches acceptance of insufferable conditions as divinely orchestrated.
The current rate and extent of climate change is not divinely dictated – it is entirely human caused and there are names, addresses and identities of the guilty but unaccountable parties involved. The reason the American media ignores the reality of climate change, the wide-spread suffering of other peoples and nations now unfolding is because they’re enamored with their own religion. The religion of money, which must be obtained by any means possible. Deception and dishonesty is the easiest technique of all to obtain riches. Entertainment is another.
The unpleasantness of the world isn’t something that “sells”, so it’s hidden as long as possible. Those responsible for the suffering are also hidden from view for as long as possible. Occasionally there is a sacrifice, and expunging of the convicted from our midst to make temporary amends for all the wrongs that can’t remain forever hidden, but then it’s always a swift return to the deception and dishonesty, infotainment for the masses and constant distraction from the horrifying truth of what we have done, and what we have all become.
Somalia may be running on empty, but this is a reflection of a much greater global truth. It is we who are empty. We lack even the capacity to understand this simple truth. We’ve lost our way, and our compassion, and our ability to even comprehend the true meaning of complicity and responsibility, remaining lost within our imaginations and the religions of our mind to the endless reel of fantasies playing across our thoughts for a world which will never be.
We have made sure of that. Not many people know it. But eventually everyone will.
