"Shine On"

Note: This was my first blog/article, here on Hub-pages. I took it down because it had hardly any reads but at a friend's request today (17th January, 2012), I am re-posting it.

This past year seems very different … different than any other year. There have been uncertain years before, like in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. I remember my parents speaking worryingly of whether Russia would send troops into Romania to secure their Iron Curtain which was slowly breaking up. The world’s turmoil was very real even to a ten year old kid like me. I recognized things were changing and the world as I knew it was not going to last. Indeed, a little over a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall the Romanian revolution took place and my entire life changed drastically.
I cannot fully describe the feeling of “knowing” that the world is changing. It is a matter of seeing the distress and despair in people’s lives. And now, things cannot continue much longer in the way they have been. It is just an impossibility. More and more people go hungry each day around the world. There are food shortages due not only to the increase in the world’s population but also due to the change in world’s climate, which has resulted in failed harvests from North America to Asia.
When that feeling of … “I have nothing to lose” settles in, people will force the status quo to change. Are we close to such a time? I do not know … but I do see people living in tents all over the United States; they seem to be catching up slowly to the Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, in terms of living conditions. There is a general distrust in governments around the world. The consolidation of wealth and power by a low percentage of the world’s population is also becoming more visible and unacceptable by a wide majority who are living on food stamps.
The flood of people from Africa into Europe; from Asia and Latin America into North America and the migration of eastern Europeans into western Europe will continue. The lack of infrastructure, education and hope for a “decent” life in some parts of the world is despicable and thus, people will continue leaving such places moving into “first world” countries. In France for example, there are 6-7 million Muslims and that number is increasing. The fabric of societies is changing all over Europe and North America due to the influx of immigration.
So, if this ridiculous “war on terror” is not the “clash of civilizations” which some people think Samuel P. Huntington talked about then, I believe the next set of wars will be just that. Life as we know it is changing fast. The future wars will be a direct result of people not having the most basic of necessities: food and water. There is no doubt that this is our next challenge, to feed ourselves and rid ourselves of the status-quo.

2nd Note: My photograph, Mount Robertson, 2010