OPINION FROM PENNSYLVANIA

From John Cooper, Pennsylvania

ToSolveTheProblemsOfTheWorld it seems to me requires more than making things easier politically for small businessmen in America.

The real problems of the world now are three:

1. This planet cannot support 6+ billion human beings, much less the 9 billion plus we seem headed for!

2. Humanity has raped the irreplaceable resources of this planet, consuming in less than two centuries what it took millions of years to create and put in place.  And we have NO viable plans for other sources of, or replacements for, those resources when what little that is left is gone.  The oceans and the atmosphere appear to have suffered irreversible changes and the climate will necessarily follow suit.  Inevitably there will be major changes in life-style.  But our band keeps playing on.

3. The most affluent life-styles of humanity are grossly disproportionately allocated to descendants of western Europe.  The vast majority of humanity bitterly envies the comparatively opulent life-styles of present and former west Europeans.  That enmity is the source of most of the violence experienced between descendants of west European and other cultures.  The ‘haves’ and ‘have-mores’ desperately try to maintain their ascendancy over the ‘have-lesses’ and ‘have-nots’.  It’s not just ‘resource wars’ we have been experiencing since the 1940s, but abundance allocation conflicts.

As to (re-)solving these problems, I really haven’t a clue.  Building a fair, just and equitable society on this planet just doesn’t seem to be in the cards, given the political and economic structures now in control of the way things are done.  Politicians always pander to their constituencies, telling them what they want to hear and trying to appear as though they are getting them what they want.  And economic hegemonies struggle to hold their place in line.  I don’t see anyone in effective power speaking, or striving, for the good of humanity and the planet as a whole.  Anything less just feeds and fosters the conflicts and animosity that seem to grow daily.  Constructive suggestions might be appropriate at this point.

John Cooper