Coffee,pastries,pensions,wars and betrayal.

Younger generations must be the builders of better tomorrow's and never the betrayed casualties of today.

You will no doubt ask yourself how each of the above in the title is connected with the others. Hang in for a few minutes and let me explain.

I am just back from a short trip to attend my beloved grandson’s graduation. It required leaving my cloistered existence and marching off into the hubbub of the real world and all the messages it sends—where the picayune details reveal many more subterranean convulsions heading our way.

As I was ordering a coffee in a famous coffee shop I looked over at the pastry display which was a barren landscape. The decision had been made to display only single samples. When ordered, the clerk would deliver the item from a cabinet behind the counter. What was so painfully obvious was how downsized the pastries had become — where the intrepid consumer was paying more to receive even less. This was generally true of my whole trip where prices are going up and portions are going down. In a favorite restaurant I noted both portions and quality had diminished.

All of this reminded me of the anecdote from post WW I Germany. Before the war a big loaf of bread could be purchased with pocket change. After the war people had to go to the bakery with a wheel barrow full of money to buy a meager loaf of bread.

Over coffee I was paging through the news and came across an article where the “esteemed” government of Canada was announcing pension cuts where Canadians would be working longer to get less. The disingenuous reporter failed to make the distinction that Canadians weren’t just working longer by choice, but of necessity.

This came from the same government who just shipped 4 billion dollars off to NATO to fight a war already lost. This is the same government that is spending 79 billion dollars to purchase 88 F35 jet fighters, even as the same jets are being shot out of the sky in the Middle East, each one costing120 million dollars. It is estimated the Middle East wars are costing the US 200 million dollars a day. TACO(Trump Always Chickens Out) has announced he wants to raise military spending to over a trillion dollars a year. He has already cut 13 million Americans off of medical benefits and is destroying what’s left of America’s public education system.

The Europeans are crazy for war now. The French, the British and the Germans lead the way but as the analysts are telling us they have neither the money or militaries to fight major wars. The British prime minister is slashing pensions to pay for wars with a military Britain no longer has. Britain,France and Germany are all defunct imperialist empires, vassals to the American empire who have seen their economies ruined; like Ukraine they are proxies to the empire’s war on Russia.

European leaders are so delusionally corrupt they think a Russian invasion is imminent when all this does is betray their ignorant paranoia. Russia does not have any desire or motive to invade Western Europe— This is the same Europe liberated in 1945 only to be colonized the US and now needs to cast off the yoke of colonization and become an independent entity in its own right.

So much for pastries and pensions!

I was a war baby and have been witness to serial warfare all my life. We have become so inured to war we accept it as a natural state of being. I refuse to accept it as history has recorded so faithfully the ruinous price we pay for endless wars. Especially so, when we are at a point in history where war is an existential threat to planet Earth and we must see war in this context.

The first step forward for present and future generations is to repudiate war at a time when peaceful co-existence is essential and all conflicts are settled through mediation and diplomacy.

Wars and empires are the ultimate betrayal of the populations governments are mandated to serve. In the West the betrayal is profound and ongoing and will continue to be so as populations are cowering in the shadows of a grand spectacle of self-defeating wars, corruptions and fallacious despotism. All 32 NATO member nations are slave states to the empires war on the world, and a war it cannot win.

The second step is to see the world as it really is. All the wars and conflicts we are experiencing now are revanchist, spiteful attempts by the failing American empire. It wants a unipolar world where it dominates over all, refusing to take its rightful place as a major power in a rapidly emerging multipolar world.

The rise and fall of empires is an immutable law of history, stretching back to ancient times. They are 'houses of cards,' built by fallible men, doomed to collapse like the inevitable cycles of day and night, life and death.

A third step forward is to recognize we are in a malignant state of crisis. It is most urgent that we move from crisis to resolution. As the longer the crisis is sustained the more intractable it becomes and the consequences more devastating. With each passing day the return to some semblance of democracy, peace and civility become more elusive.

I will be writing more on this in future blogs but in the 20th Century both Russia and China went through great social ruptures at the hands of Stalin and Mao Zedong. These two leaders inflicted enormous suffering on their countries, killing and murdering millions of their citizens. There were wars, revolutions and famines killing off millions more. As a response to these atrocities both have gone through immense social revolutions. Today they have emerged as modern states pursuing peace and prosperity, wanting nothing to do with the wars and imperialism of the West. They refuse to give up their hard won sovereignty, peace and prosperity. They want nothing to do with wars which would compromise the great leaps forward they have made in the last half century.

There are many complex reasons for the tensions between East and West but the most crucial is that the West has not faced its day of reckoning as have these two countries. It too must go through its social revolution and purge itself of its corrupted past of the 20th century and embrace the realities of the 21st and its appropriate roll in it.

My grandsons have had the benefit of going to school with many immigrants and exchange students. Their circle of friends come from many different countries around the world. During this last visit the graduate told me he had just received an email from a friend in Jordan where they could see the Iranian missiles headed for Israel.

My hope for them is that they do not fall prey to the hate, xenophobia, and racism passed down by older generations, and that they continue to cultivate a holistic view of the world. We forget that too many of humanity’s most damaging traits are not innate, but are learned behaviors indoctrinated by incompetent leadership, dysfunctional societies and propaganda.

Where there is no sense of outrage, there is no path to remediation. Futures are frozen in time and place. Outrage is the alarm bell of souls. When societies need rebuilding it is the first step forward to meaningful change.

The younger generations must always be the builders of better tomorrows and never the betrayed casualties of today.

History’s Parrot is read in 38 US states and 54 countries world wide.