Yes, Foxy. Can't imagine what that could have been like. It's so indescribably awful what some humans can do o others, for some perceived difference. Today there seems to be, new minority scapegoats for the alt-right and the extreme left.

Be it a Muslim minority here or impoverished Latinos elsewhere. One has seen pictorial of men women and children line up against a mass grave and machined gunned into it. All allegedly done in the name of alleged patriotism. And today even as I pen these lines there are several megalomaniacs with a stockpile of the worlds most powerful weapons and only prevented from using them by the spectre of mutual destruction.

Star wars as envisaged by Ragen ended the concept of mutual destruction and now Trump seems to want to revitalise that to end the mutual destruction roadblock.

And he wants an arms race that can only provoke and increase tension.

We live in dangerous times on a world gone mad and where as one looks around, one sees a situation too often repeated where the inmates have taken over and are now running the asylum.

We and the world need to end its captive market reliance on fossil fuels. And become where possible, islands of sanity in a world gone mad and rushing headlong toward annihilation?

My Celtic forbears also lost their lands, lives, liberties and heritage during both the highland clearances and the annexation of large swathes of Ireland.

My maternal great grandmum survived into her nineties and told us of the advent of the black and tans, where the English emptied their prisons and put murders, rapist and outright villains in uniform and just let them loose on the Irish to loot plunder and rape at will.

We also fled the atrocity and horror even though two of my great great granduncles fought alongside the English as victoria cross winners. Its these brave and inherently decent men we should honour, not the calloused and indifferent mongrels that threw them into harm's way!
Alan.

Dear Alan,

Thank You for sharing.

You write with such power and integrity.

We need new way of thinking to cope with the
nuclear age. I wrote on another discussion that
it is here that writers, with their concern for the
human condition and their special skills with language,
can enable us to imagine the horrific reality of
nuclear arms and nerve us to build an alternative
future.

Maurice Strandgard writes:

"Somewhere there must be a place
Called Little Peace
Where men with little humanity
Do not have the power
To make great decisions.
Where little fears do not lessen
The so small span
Of our lives,
Where
For once
We can know peace.
Just a little.
To know the taste of it."

There can never be peace so long as there are people who expect others to carry them through life in more comfort than those who support.

Exactly Individual, none more so than those tax avoiding leaners who have others, their brains and bent sweat-soaked backs, earn all their income for them. As they lord it over one and all, thinking themselves how massively wonderful they are for earning all that, bulging at the seams, vaults of money.

For example, a six times bankrupt D Trump who left a trail of broken lives, broken dreams, and broken family enterprises in his wake as he "EARNED" his billions.

And he has many many cigar-chomping, conyac swarfing mates, forever critical of others. but aging day by day as they inch inexorably toward their own final day of judgement and have to look love straight in the eye and total up all their deeds to find as much as one single genuine example where love personified, alone decided any of their, arranged by them, outcomes.

Me, I'd have them trot alongside a hay truck throwing square bales of green lucerne hay up for fourteen straight hours a day, to have them understand what a real man's work looks like.

To be fair. I'd match them up with a few sixty and seventy-year-olds well hardened to this real physical work and only ask they keep up.

And let's see how many of these self-congratulating ultra-privileged windbags and leaners survive more than one single day.

Imagine self-made millionaires, born the log cabins they hewed out of the wilderness, with their own bare hands, Gina or Clive actually lasting for more than a single hour?

Albeit, a couple of giant bellies would possibly continue to wobble for that long after they stopped?

Like the aforementioned, not one of them would have actually carried arms, been put in or served in harm's way, but rather used the power of privilege and influence to very-very adroitly avoid it? Let alone, volunteer?
Alan B.

There will never be peace as long as humanity holds onto certain faults, flaws and fantasies.
As long as there is greed and averace, there will be no piece.
As long as people 'dream' about peace, there will be no peace.
As long as people refuse to mature and exercise reason and common sense, there will be no peace.
It behooves us to stand by and do nothing when we can clearly see what others fail to see, that their beliefs are the reason there will be no peace.
As long as we refrain from disabusing others, with their naive beliefs or lies and fallacies, there will be no peace.
As long as we refrain from speaking truthfully, there will be no peace.
Let's face it, there is no magic pill that will suddenly change the EQ of human beings.
Again it is a fool, a dreamer, a fantasist who even dares to whisper such unrealities.
In life, there will always be spectrum's, or variables, as in good and bad, short and tall, and so on.
And so it is we can never end up with a perfect human, because the 'bar' is continually moving.
Take a dozen of the most pure and perfect men by todays standards, there will still be the one who is deemed to be the most pure and the rest are progressively less so as you move down the line.
And so it is with humanity.
I cannot wear fools, and it would appear that those who promote this panacea of life, are either unthinking fools or unrealistic dreamers.
Either way they are dangerous people, preaching false hope and dogma as if they are the authority on the topic they speak.
As long as human kind has ALL it's faculties it is born with, there will be no peace, and people saying or wishing it otherwise only anger and frustrate people like myself, because I can see what they are refusing to see.

Yes Altrave, the world is full of dreamers!

And they go back as far as the eye can see. Starting with blind fools who imagined they could harness the power of steam and move virtual tons of freight at speeds greater than forty miles an hour, even though the wise men like yourself no doubt, knew for sure and for certain, that it couldn't be done and that anything over forty miles per hour would automatically terminate the lives of all those who tried it.

Then even greater dreamers with even more in]mpossible dreams dreamed men could fly. Even though we, you and I, the very practical down to earth men we are, knew if a man were meant to fly? He'd have been born with wings.

then there were those outright looney tunes who thought they could put a man on the moon. Absolute insanity, it'll never ever happen and as much chance as building a massive world-leading economy with inclusive cooperative capitalism.

Yes I know, cooperative capitalism keeps your money in your own economy until completely exhausted and as it does so, makes every one dollar do the economic work of seven or more, thanks to the inherent flow on factors that obliges just that to happen.

It'd be an absolute tragedy, if we could drought proof this economy, and have to import guest labour because we had completely full employment and the best wage scales and conditions in the world. And like all of the other aforementioned, we the smart folks, know, none of that is possible!

Or that an overheating planet can actually ever end its reliance on coal.

Without coal?

What on earth would either Gina Or Clive have for breakfast? And with the generous donations of this industry how could the coalition win a seat, let alone, government?
Alan B.