LIKE it or not, the world will never be the same again, hopefully for the better. It has not strayed off just to the shoulders of the road of life, but far and deep into the marshes and forests of the wild. It and we in it have thus been infected by the way of the wild, which we have since allowed to run our lives.
It is nothing short of ironic that a virus from a wild bat is now painfully prompting us to consider a return from the wild back to the road of just and free human existence.
The quintessential way of the wild is survival of the fittest. Fueled by greed and driven by market forces, this way has produced a world of extreme wealth in few, and extreme poverty in many, nations and individuals.
The former enjoy the freedom to live in ease and comfort and to spend gazillions for sophisticated weapons to protect their way of life. The latter have only the freedom to be ignorant and uneducated, jobless and destitute, hungry and starving, sick, lacking medical care, and dying anonymous on the wayside.
It is as if spaceship earth is flying on autopilot, with no rational mind at the controls to insure that everybody (not just the few in first class) has an enjoyable ride. World organizations like the UN do not work for the equality of all nations. They touch the controls only to make sure all systems are flashing green, oblivious of the fact that if the spaceship self-destructs it doesn’t matter whether one is in first class or economy.
This is the crisis of the modern world. It cannot feed and educate many yet what a few are spending for weapons that secure their opulent life-style is enough to feed the world’s sick and hungry poor.
If I may mix metaphors, our computer has been infected with a destructive virus that we must first destroy before we can hit the reset button and introduce a program that gets rid of the way of the wild and returns us to the road of civilized human behavior (translate: justice and freedom to everyman regardless of race, religion or financial condition).
It must not be passed over in silence that part of the crisis is the failure of world religions to supplant the way of the wild with the way of the spirit. I don’t know about the others but the Catholic Church has also been infected by the wild. It is more interested in preserving itself as an institution than on making life fair to everyone. It thus needs to hit the reset button so to engage the way of the wild with the way of the spirit.
Am I asking for the impossible here? Maybe, but I stand pat on my position that resetting and making all things new (politics, economics, education, religion, family life, etc.) is what the world needs to do to return from the wild to the road to freedom.