WHAT IN THE WORLD......

     Just pick up a paper or go to any news site on the web and you can have the reaction of the title of today's posting: what in the world is going on! I cannot remember such a confused and dark time as this, not for a long time. Perhaps when I was a kid and we were hiding underneath desks to be "safe" from nuclear attacks (as if!), but I really was less concerned about the world then than I was about getting to be an expert in several "turning over" games and Russian Ten. (Remember those games? Ahhh, the innocent times).
     In today's world I have no innocent out, just a bewilderment at how quickly things have turned real bad. And perhaps the moods of the world, the attitudes of the world can be and indeed are reflected within the "waters" of CVWPB, and that is scary enough, but when looking at the whole picture, it is truly frightening. Our values are skewed, we seem to be fighting old battles and there seems to be no end to the road as one looks down its path.
     So in today's world we seem to still be fighting racism. Black Lives Matter, protest marches and forced resignations on campuses, shootings and so what? All this will never change people, only life will. All Lives Matter would be the better title for a group. The lives of women matter as they still face violence on campus and on the streets. There are still the snickers of "Well, she asked for it" and universities are still favoring the he man of the football team over the words of a violated young lady. The swastikas are being painted all over the campuses and BDS is masquerading as a political statement when it really is a hate movement and the world makes it politically okay to indulge in anti Semitism again and the beatings of Jews continues, 70 years after Hitler and his supporters - and there were many - tried to wipe us off the face of this earth. Hatred based on sexual orientation and body imagery is just flourishing and once again we have bigots and haters quoting the Bible and G-d to support their nauseating stands. And teeny little countries are becoming even teenier as they fight amongst themselves for smaller and smaller pieces of independent countries as we no longer try to live together and emphasize similarities, but instead stress our differences.
     Will it ever end? Why does it continue? And you ask why I love these apocalyptic shows? Not really for the sights and sounds of people eating each other or killing each other. I generally look away at those or from those, but instead for the fascination of seeing versions of how the world and society reinvents itself. How do we cope with a society gone broken and shattered into pieces? How do we rebuild a society and its values - or can we? Is it even possible and are the zombies of the shows really replications of real life people who are eating us up with their twisted values and demands, with their skewed demands?
     And so the world now fights over the territories of the Poles as the ice melts and as we flood the world's shores, we fight over mineral rights. Shall the future students of the world learn another period of exploration in their history classes? Or shall there be no classes for we will have broken the world?
     Will there be anyone left in the African countries that are turning into deserts, as their people starve - and the pictures of starving and bone thin stunned children are truly heartbreaking - but the power struggle in those countries goes on as children are made into soldiers, girls are made into sex slaves and at present in the Sudan alone there have been millions killed - yes, millions - and millions others displaced. One country alone and this can be multiplied in many other countries - be it Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq and the list goes on. And this cannot be resolved by transferring the populations of these countries en masse into other countries of the world. It is an impossibility in so many ways that we need to truly look to solving the core issues, the roots and not the symptoms.
     But we never will if we allow demagogues and dictators, haters and liars, power seekers and cowards to run the world. How do we do this? G-d, if I knew how I would be out there shouting the answer to the Heavens, but I do not have the answers, only the questions, but that is a place to start - asking questions and demanding answers from the purported rulers and leaders of the world, demanding that they all come together as WORLD leaders rather than as partisan bullies. Will this ever happen - in the world and in smaller places suffering under similar though smaller proportions? Only G-d knows and as for the rest of us - just keep on truckin' and perhaps our efforts will be rewarded and at the very least we know that we have done our best, our share in Tikkun Olam - in the fixing of the world.