Ripe for the Picking - The Coming Times

The Coming Times

Ripe for the Picking

And we see scenes of war

Here, there, everywhere

Wars are being fought

It is not one global worldwide war

It is a series of wars

Strung across the planet

Not one continent is spared

Very few countries are spared

Neighbor is fighting neighbor

War after war after war is being waged

And each one is waged with intensity, with passion, with hatred

The passion for war consumes the combatants

And they see nothing but their victory

The victory is all that matters

No price is too high to pay

No body count too high

No amount of destruction too great

Victory at any cost

Victory at all cost

And these wars are like brush fires spread across the globe

It seems that before one is put out

Another starts

And then another

The whole world has gone insane

And the violence is reported in the media

And is seen as allowable behavior

If so-and-so did this to achieve their ends

Then so can we

And so war spreads and continues to spread

And I see smoke rising up from the earth

The aftermath of a battle

And the smoke darkens the air

Day is as dark as dusk

And remains so

And I see the survivors of the battle

Shell-shocked and traumatized

Their town, their village, yes their city destroyed

The buildings collapsed to rubble

Their relatives, friends and neighbors dead

All dead

And I see this continue over a period of time

Decades go by

And these wars continue

And the media explains in great detail

The specific reason for this specific war

Its history, its participants

And the excuses they give for hating each other so

And each war is treated as though it is unique

Each one of them is covered by the media

As though it were unique

The history of the populace is given

Their centuries old grievance

What triggered this fresh assault

And these explanations are given over and over again

For each different war

And the names of the players change

And one cycles through the list of excuses for the war

Land, religion, ethnicity

And yes the details, the surface details are analyzed

Exhaustively by the political experts as they debate

How to bring this particular confrontation to an end

And as they debate

Another war springs up somewhere on the planet

And yet another war somewhere else on the planet

And the experts look at the superficial details

And no one looks at the underlying cause:

Man has gone mad

Collective insanity abounds

Hatred has been given the nod

Yes, it is all right to kill your neighbor

For if the greatest country in the world

Can go killing people all over the globe

With impunity

With no negative consequence

They, the greatest of us all

Our role models

The paragons of virtue and democracy do this

And are allowed to do this

Then how much more should we

Who are considered less advanced

How much more free should we be

To emulate them and imitate them

As they constantly exhort us to

Yes! Let us emulate them

Yes! Let us have democracy!

Yes! Let us have money!

Yes! Let us kill whenever and wherever we please!

And so they do

Ceaselessly they do

Relentlessly they do

Without end they do

Until finally the entire globe

Looks as though it has suffered a holocaust

The entire globe is smoldering in ashes and smoke

And the survivors walk around in a stupor and in a haze

Eyeing each other

Eyeing one and all with suspicion and with dread and with fear

And now it is as though the world has come to a standstill

The world has come to a stop

Most of the wars have been fought out

There are a few still being waged here and there

But most of the players are spent

They are dead. They are wounded. They are broken

The cities of both the victor and the defeated

Are left as piles of rubble

The edifices destroyed

Most of the population – of both the victor and the defeated

Are dead, or physically broken, or emotionally traumatized

And it is so the whole world over

The entire globe is in this state

The entire planet is defeated

The entire planet has been devastated by war

No, it was not World War III

But it might as well have been

The consequences are the same

And the planet is eerily silent

The air waves are silent

The media is not heard

It too has been a casualty of the wars

And the people are silent

Silent they are

Stunned they are

Not knowing what to do next they are

And thus they are ripe for the picking

Ripe they are

For the snake to come in

And complete the job

The people have themselves begun