Monday, December 19, 2011

Toys of the Moment....

"Trouble rather the tiger in his lair, than the sage among his books.
For to you, kings & armies are things mighty & enduring.
To him, mere toys of the moment, to be overturned at the flick of a finger."- Gordon Dickson

"Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword."-
R. Buckminster Fuller
 
If anything is certain about the human race, it is that humanity has devoted much time, thought, capital and resource into the abuse and killing of each other. We spend time training individuals, have entire industries devoted to manufacturing arms & equipment for them, and organize them into cohesive forces for the sole purpose of implementing strategic force upon others. This is what is known as "The Military Industrial Complex"..
Since my birth, in June of 1962, to the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1990, I had been living in the shadow of the Cold War, and with the residues of the previous World War, as well as the conflicts in the Middle East, Korea and Viet Nam. Indeed, much of my early years included watching television news reports, via Satellite, from war zones...

Some people speak of this time as being one of excessive paranoia, but I don't recall that, at all. By the time I was old enough to understand, the Cuban Missile crisis was long past, and we had settled into a strained complacency that these matters would always be with us.. We children were actually optimistic about our futures, believing that: 
  1. no one was stupid enough to risk mutually assured destruction. 
  2. we were becoming more and more like the Communists, while the Communists were becoming more and more like us.
The sense of a sword of damocles hanging over our heads was offset by the sense of the firm hand of "You've got to be kidding!" wrapped about the hilt... We went our merry way, playing at war, or paying others to play at it for us. We'ed be careless in our play, destroying lives. And careless in putting all the toys back where we found them...
Some of our toy soldiers, otherwise harmless at the time, became dangerous once play time had ended...
Some toys, thought long ago lost, still manage to turn up and wreck havoc...
Some toys take effort to track down, lest they turn lethal...
...while others acted out of spite that children refused to play with them.
And then, new children entered the playground, bringing new toys to the game...
Indeed, many began to worry just what was still left in the toy box, that shouldn't be played with at all...
When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things- 1st Corinthians, 13:11

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