Humanity: What Have We Become? 2024 and Beyond

    Ending this year, near midway through our decade, the third of this millennium, it might be good to reflect and take a look around. Think about our values and hopes.

    I had a decent day, on a personal note. I played basketball with some friends, and my teams won a few, and I contributed to the games, got a good workout, and we all left healthy. Eleven of us. Okay, I missed a three to win one game, but we won all the rest. 7 games, eight games? We, I attended a viewing and the funeral of a 44-year-old. Not sure how he died. But the farewell was sweet, beautiful, and sad. But, we hold on to what we care about. Family, love, friends, community, grace, and kindness. Plenty of that this morning into the afternoon. Tears, and truth, and love.

    Then, my alma maters had to lose. Ugh, back-to-back losses for me today, and BYU back-to-back weeks. The seasons have been so good! But now... 

    Finished the evening with family playing SCRABBLE. My son wiped us out, getting big points with words like HONK, for more than 40 points. I barely beat my wife who usually schools me, but I think I cheated a bit at the end.

    But the point of this blog entry is about the greater humanity: our concerns, our problems, our plights.

    Understandably many of us, in the millions and particularly more youth, are very concerned with climate change and wrecking our planet. Good, those are real things to work on and improve. We must not run the earth's environments down and out. We have to find solutions to climate control and change, and pollution and ecological disaster.

    However, I have been thinking about how us humans, governments, armies and navies have been doing atrocious numbers on each other for all of our lives. Sometimes embodied in a person such as Mao, or Stalin, or Hitler, or Pol Pot, Idi Amin. Sometimes it is a group, a terrifying junta or cabal. Others can point to George W. Bush or Tony Blair as the meanies and killers, as opposed to the ones they sacked, like Saddam Hussein. And what of Putin and Netanyahu in 2024? Food for thought.

    

    However, it ... Moving on.

    Since 1924, the world has had its share of bad things that humans do to other humans. In the nastiest ways, apart from pollution and environmental degradation, and greedy privations that leave others out of the safety zones that we all deserve. The last 100 years can show us a few things.  And, unfortunately, my list will not be that comprehensive. Just my own thoughts and impressions of what bad things have occurred. As a biased American (U.S. citizen, Ana) and a patriot, I would like to think that the United States has helped more militarily than destroyed, but the nation and its service members have been part of many an ugly episode, to include all the interventions and wars.

    What is a what's what of the worst episodes? Here is a stab or so, no pun intended.

    World War II

    Much in this war was started by consequences of the First World War. Disgruntlements by the losers, Germany, led to more hostilities a generation later. Italy switched sides; go figure. Imperial Japan started its conquest in China many years before Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939. Most of the 1930s had Japanese troops sweeping across their side of the world. China got the worst of it. Then eventually Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. (mostly but not just Russia, which was also largely Ukraine). 

    Tens of millions died. Some by starvation, or others freezing to death. Others in the gas chambers. 1931-1945

    Chinese Steps Backward

    The Japanese were savage in China the previous decades, but maybe Mao Ze Dong killed more through his miss-steps and economic plans that led to starvation of millions? Follow by 10-20 million being killed in the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976.

    Yikes. They also killed a million or so in the annexation of Tibet around 1959.

    Lately, they have oppressed a few million in Hong Kong, but not too violently, but have been more forceful and repressed against the Uyghur of Xinjiang.

    Congo 

Between 1995 and 2005, possibly 20 million Congolese died in this country. Hard to fathom. No one really knows the numbers. This was right after 1994 when about 800,000 people in Rwanda were massacred, mostly Hutus. Or was it Tutsis? Either way, really bad.

    Vietnam 

or 

    Korean Peninsula

Both were bad, killing many U.S. G.I.s, but many more locals were killed. Many Chinese in Korea, from 1951-1953. Vietnam went for us from 1960 to 1975. We lost almost 60,000 service members. One Clinch, in May of 1970. A Lieutenant? I read his name at the memorial not long ago.

    Iraq 

I am definitely thinking of U.S. conflicts and wars, but I should get to a few non-American wars and tragedies, too. A newspaper in the 1990s, maybe while I was attending college, proclaimed that the U.S. forces had killed 100,000 Iraqis in the liberation of Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm. That was before we got into the country with 100k plus boots on the ground in 2003 and after.

    Of course, Saddam and the Shah fought each other in most of the 1980s, which cost Iran at least 1,000,000 victims, who they call martyrs. They are the ultimate Shia folks, which is sadly ironic, because the Sunni dictator of the Land of Two Rivers, former Babylon, and he, the self-fashioned Nebuchadnezzar, commanded his Shia rather than Sunni troops to the front line, more prone to be slaughtered. Perhaps like the Soviets sending more Ukrainians in harm's way than their native Russians.

    Afghanistan

    Many have died there over the last one hundred years. Which year was the worst? Was it when the United States and its allies of ISAF were targeting the terrorists and the insurgents.

    How many died there while the West was present from 2001 to 2021? Hopefully the killing has been reduced although we know that the repression over the general populace has come down with a vengeance.

    Algeria

This large, largely forgotten country has had times of war. Against the French in the 1960s, against themselves in the 1990s.

    Syria, Yemen, now Gaza... Perhaps Lebanon... Many Arab nations since the Arab Spring of 2011, and Lebanon in their Civil War of 1975 to 1990. 

    Sudan and other African nations. Uganda, Somalia... 

    Cambodia had an awful genocide by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. At least two million died.

    The last hundred years have been difficult and impossible for so many.

    Before that in the 1700s and 1800s, there was the constant systematic reduction of the native Americans in the Western Hemisphere. It goes back to the violence and sicknesses of the first Europeans coming in, making contact, displacing or making other contact with the indigenous.

    Bosnia got bad in the 1990s.

    Ethiopia and a few other places have faced mass starvation, like in 1985. Somalia more recently, or what lead to U.N. forces in Mogadishu in the early 1990s.

    North Korea has faced starvation.

    What are we, if not social animals and little monsters or saviors, depending on the time or circumstance?

    What do we do today? Do we care about starving Gazans, or the Israelis threatened by Hamas or other Palestinian terrorists? Who are who? What of Lebanese Hizballah supporters? Or those back to Syria, Iraq, Iran?

    Where else? Catastrophes have wiped out many: earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons, floods. Yet wars are the human-driven calamities.

    

    Where do we draw lines, or how do we try to implement zones of security?

    How do we save our planet? Do we put more resources in the elements and physical ways of preserving our plants, seas, animals, and biomes? Or should we focus more on the humans?

    Can we do neither well enough? Does our dismal science of economics prevent us from having the proper resources to fix these problems?

    Are we better than before 1924? I think so.

    But while the scientific foibles and challenges vex us in our environmental realms, to include space beyond our atmosphere, there is the constant pain and conundrum of us killing each other, ourselves.

    What have we become? Are we better than the last century? I think that we are better, despite the Holy Land, between the Arabs and the Israelis, and the Ukrainian and Russian nonsense.

    We can, we should, we will (fingers crossed) do better.

    We must. Be better. Be more secure. Less killing, less violence.