Remembrances and remnants

Is anyone else afraid these days? I am. It seems we all go through our days hoping for the best, continuing to do the daily thing, and living life as though the world were normal, even though it isn’t.
Many people continue working for the greater good, even as many work against it for their own personal gain. I know I can’t be alone in not being able to figure out what the avaricious will do with such gain when the world is disintegrating around them, perhaps literally.
For starters, hello March. Just had to mention that, this month, we mark the beginning of our third year with COVID. We thought COVID would be the end of daily life as we knew it, and guess what? It was. Many jobs have been eliminated forever; others have gone “virtual” forever. Too many people have discovered the convenience of it and don’t care to return to the days of social interaction in an office, wearing dress clothes all the way to our shoes. Socially we’re still feeling the effects from COVID too. It’s already gone on too long, and it will continue, unnecessarily, until politics stop playing a role in recovery. Serious, but still, not our greatest threat.
We need to concern ourselves with many threats. Some are due to an inability or unwillingness to understand life on a world scale. Some are due to the plague as old as humanity itself – ego. We all know this, even if we never took an active interest in our ancient history or modern human activity, or never really looked at the evolution of life, society, and war. Even a superficial, indifferent glance at history or current events will show us the condition the world is in, via ego.
It’s very much like a chain. No individual link is the whole of it, but every link affects its strength or weakness. Of human action, every one affects our every direction, every day, especially those steps taken by they who have power, whether they took it or were given it by vote.
Most great nations are in some trouble all the time. Right now, many are perched on the precarious branch that is a response to an act of war – yes, that’s what it is, war – started by Russia. Today, war isn’t what many of us think of it as being. Ours world is a nuclear world.

The aggression of mankind against mankind has a history as far back as we can track human presence on the planet. There may have been times when it was imperative to the survival of the victor, but more often it was less valorous. In our more recent history, cooperation has to be the better choice, but the ever-present problem is ego, whether personal or political.
What drives ego? Everyone dies. All that’s left is memory. Regardless of how anyone is remembered, for how long, revered, reviled, by whom or how many … everyone dies. What we leave behind will be remembered by someone for some amount of time, and some people leave behind a history never to be forgotten.
A personal history is determined by personal choices and dictated by actions during life, voluntary and accidental. Whether we are remembered for true greatness, for conditional, potential, or perspective greatness, or remembered in infamy, we all die – and when we die, we are dead forever, at least to this world. No one has ever successfully disproven that. No one has ever been able to alter how he or she is remembered, once departed, either. So, what is any legacy for?
Putin is waging war. It’s hard to imagine how another war, in this nuclear age, can occur without great alteration to both the planet and its population. I have plans to interview a U.S. Army career officer later this month, if he isn’t detained by the war. His assessment will be far better than that of most people. If what’s left behind is a damaged population whose world has been devastated, figuratively and/or physically, it will not matter that the perpetrators are remembered.
Being the trigger man of such a disaster may serve Putin’s ego in his life, for however long he’s here to see it. If he isn’t here to see it, just being remembered may be enough for him. For the rest of us, the price could be higher even than his.
If we can prevent it, that course must be better than the alternative.

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