What has become of civilized humanity, I ask you? We are living in 2014, and, yet, we are seeing beheadings that we thought ended in Paris with the guillotine. These terrors must be discussed and analyzed to guard against in the future. Purges and pogroms, however insane, are committed by the state or the dissolution of state and moral authority, as seen in modern Iraq and Syria, where crime, like power, seems to have become the estate of the common man.

The man of today has become the most feared figure of all time. It is distressing not to trust one’s neighbour — for the traveler to peer incessantly at every strange face at every terminal in every country. It is frustrating to find history is still, to quote Edward Gibbon two centuries ago, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

The notion that society is becoming intolerable is charted in news releases at every moment.  The chilling example of the James Foley execution, and the braggadocio of his killers, then the threat of reprisals against Americans, begs the question, what are we coming to, where will it all end?

This madness has to be quelled as we are moving towards a nightmare. For our world to arrive at a reasonable destination will be the most difficult task facing any nation at any time in history. I want to live in peace and quietude, not anarchy.

 

William Studer

Albert Lea