Ready for a new threat? It’s just as ethereal and deadly as Covid-19. It strips away our naive precautions just as efficiently and wrecks havoc far beyond its relatively short existence when it’s finally put under control. In a word, “worse” than the virus. I rely specifically on my African experience to tell you about this.
I experienced it mostly in troubled times and situations, a singular threat to my protecting my group. But it also walloped me when I least expected it, when everything around me seemed just so perfect and peaceful.
Rage.
The worst locust outbreak ever seen in Africa, the most insidious virus ever known to man, the most flooding and worst earthquakes in history… then, bloodshed.
Populism is not some lonesome social condition. Populism controls democracy, and populism brings down and sets up autocratic regimes. It’s not conservative or progressive, capitalist or communist. It’s not necessarily based on truth. It’s knee-jerk support for – or against – individuals wielding power. Why? How is it harnessed?
Sometimes good acts prevail even after evil-doers reverse them:
Facebook’s under a lot of negative scrutiny right now, but organized by Sudanese women it may be the weapon which finally ousts the current Sudanese dictator, Omar al-Bashir.
In the British Parliament a prominent Lord urges the government to recolonize Zimbabwe. Russia’s methodical promotion of oligarchy finds purchase in the Central African Republic, where it’s close to controlling the government. In the U.S. religious groups blossom in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Last week’s Nairobi bombing may not have been against Kenya, but America.
Have you ever watched a colony of anemones? Touch the biggest one and it immediately begins to shrink into itself. Then even without touching others, all the anemones follow suit withdrawing into themselves.
As I’m writing this protestors are 
Rocket Man Wars, Syria bombs, trade wars, bad speech, forgotten manners or even intentional rudeness, stupidity, neglect then lying if conspiracy … yes this is America to the rest of the world, but to Africa this morning, our treatment of children makes us monkeys. Monkeys take babies away from one another.
Only one country in the entire history of humankind has voluntarily 
Don’t be misled by the notion that war arrives as a gigantic catastrophic event, a North Korean slip for example. War can escalate as secretly and effectively as a gang of boomslang snakes slinking into the shed.
Rolex, Pandora, Cartier … Valentine’s approaches. This year, if you’re basically a moral and just person, you might want to stick with chocolates.
In war we focus on battles won and lost. Little question for the need to fight: the causes were reasoned as justified. In chaos spiced with denial and obfuscation it’s like punching a cloud of smoke. You die of exhaustion without landing a single punch.
The release last week of the unredacted