Human Folly
Dr. Michel E. Abs
Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches
Social crises intensify in severity, and with them the rates of poverty, unemployment, crime, family rupture and social disintegration rise. And as society becomes unable to manage its crises, it gets vulnerable to all forms of conflicts and external interventions, thus losing its autonomy and is misled into the path of decay.
There are no limits to human greed, just as there are no limits to human stupidness resulting from this greed. When those in charge of the resources of societies accumulate wealth to the extent that they become unable to manage them, at a time when some groups of the same societies lack the minimum necessities of a decent life leads to a state of uncontrolled aberration.
Between social classes, alienation outweighs alienation between one society and another.
The differences between the monopolists of wealth on the one hand and the destitute social classes on the other hand are unimaginable, be it in terms of housing conditions, food or health care, not to mention recreational activities and their ramifications.
The extravagance that we are witnessing in the world today is truly astonishing at a time when thousands of children are dying of hunger, thirst and lack of medicine, huge numbers of them fill the streets as well either to beg or to do work that the law classifies as illegal.
Moreover, the number of the homeless, the homeless, and the sick without treatment is increasing, the number of addicts to various types of trafficking is rising, and the list of disasters in modern society is growing.
At the same time, we see the race to arms raging, a race on which humanity spends more than many times what it needs in order to heal the wounds of the destitute and spread happiness among the people.
What kind of folly is this?
Did they count how many poor families the cost of each rocket of cannon could feed?
Did they calculate how many hospitals, nursing homes, and rehabilitation centers for people with special needs they could build for the price of a warplane?
Are they sure how negatively the war effort affects the level of life and well-being of populations?
As for the nuclear race, have they calculated its cost and its consequences? Moreover, how long will the poor countries remain the dumping ground for the nuclear industrial world?
How strong are arms and ammunition manufacturers, as entire populations with their governments are subjected to their profit goals!
They establish governments and bring down governments, they strengthen societies and humiliate societies!
The weak and the destitute fuel their futile wars as they are engulfed by them and pushed either to annihilation or to disease. Nothing is worse than the like of them except energy extraction and production companies. They are two sides of the same coin and complement each other.
How weak are such sons of men, panting after vainglory, opening their ears to the ringing of gold, and closing them to the plaintiveness of the wretched!
Someone told me, criticizing one of the super powers, saying that it did not win a single war it fought.
I replied that it did not intend to win wars. It is only intent is to make them!