Community post

THE APOCALYPSE

your money will not save you
your portfolio is no refuge
from the unraveling that is to come
there is no safety in gold
in crypto you cannot trust
we stand naked atop a bomb set to explode
man is wolf to man
he will never change
always shitting where he eats
the earth hates us
we hate ourselves
this generation will see hell while yet still alive
it will beg for death
the apocalypse is nigh

an original free verse poem inspired by the senseless escalation in Syria and the potential for disaster it poses

images from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of August 1945 - public domain

Replies (12)

This is my take on it. The only thing that has kept a third global war from occurring is the godawful consequences of one. Mutual assured destruction, MAD, has worked, for now. That much is obvious. Since 1945 many thousands of nuclear weapons have been built to increasing levels of lethality and power. Delivery systems have been improved: cruise missiles, submarines, bombers, ICBM's. The nightmarish scenario of all this weaponry being unleashed on the world's cities has actually kept the "peace" for 70 years. Peace for the west that is, not for millions of non-Westerners.
The 1989 collapse of the USSR disrupted the status quo of a bipolar world. Since then we have seen the rise of China as a major economic and military power who rightly wants their seat at the table. Russia has fell on hard times yet still possesses state of the art technology and weapons. The US has been abusing its unipolar position as the world's only superpower since the first gulf war. Pakistan, India, North Korea, Israel, have all become members of the nuclear club. These are the ones we know about. And unfortunately, possessing nuclear weapons is the only guarantee a nation's borders and sovereignty will be respected, thus the race for nations like Iran and others to acquire them. The failure of the UN in its mandate has returned the world to a Hobbesian nightmare, but only now with nukes. More state actors have them. There are fault lines all over the world, from the South China Sea to Syria and Iran and Ukraine. It just seems awfully naive to believe, with all the brinkmanship going on and the tit for tat bullshit, that this can continue without the balloon going up somewhere.
There has never been a time in history where a long period of technological development didn't lead to a nation believing it could attack an enemy, preemptively, and defeat them. The American Civil War utilized the first submarines, aerial reconnaissance, railroads, machine guns, etc. 1903 saw the Wright brothers conquer the skies. Eleven years later their miraculous, promising, invention was weaponized over Europe. The USA dragged the world into the nuclear era with the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945. After witnessing a level of killing power never imagined before there was no reflection, no hesitation; only two weeks later, on Aug 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was used on the civilian population of Hiroshima. "Was used" sounds so sanitary and normal. What "was used" means is 150,000 human beings were either incinerated immediately or forced to live with physical and emotional scars, and radiation poisoning, for the rest of their lives; women and children. And this was done by the "good guys." Human nature hasn't changed since then.
Political science is premised on the idea that human nature is predictable. That studying the way the human animal has acted in the past can provide a guide to how he will act in the future. That is what scares the hell out of me. Not thinking about it doesn't lessen the threat, it increases it. A nuclear winter isn't a Left-Right issue. It's in everyone's interest to see a reduction in the probability of nuclear war, and thinking about it and talking about it, as unpleasant as it is, is the necessary beginning. Billions of innocent children in this world deserve as much.