We are barely into the new year, and 2017 already poses itself in my eyes to be no better than 2016.

Am not just referring to the Maltese road deaths’ statistics, which notched their first victim in the earliest hours of the new year, but rather to the helpless sense of security at an international level when we see the terrorist attacks successfully perpetrated against the reveling civil society in Turkey over these festive holidays.

Admittedly, nobody feels safe travelling to anywhere these days, on both sides of the Atlantic pond, and especially to places in the Arab world or elsewhere beyond the known powers of democracy or Western cultures’ values and morals on life, decency and other we take so much for granted here.

Naturally, it is easy to blame the major powers’ interventions by proxy in several hotspots, by stoking the animosity between factions, by labeling one party as more righteous, deserving or legitimate than the other/s on the opposite side. And that not just by podium spewed rhetoric, but also by providing weapons, consultant boots-on-the-ground expertise and associated top notch hardware, or economic sanctions to ball bust one side through resolutions and proclamations.

On the other hand, the new trendy neo-liberalism of treehugging orators are sacrificing basic centuries honed notions of national security for sake of political correctness, embracing anybody anytime anyhow running away from such zones of upheaval and strife.

That in all this mess of humanity, the upsurging economic prosperity of some around us and ourselves isn’t bothering us in the least as being a temporary bubble of financial opiate giving us a high,  is really blissfully procrastinating the doom and gloom which history teaches when it comes round its full circle.

And some wise folks are so stockpiling for such emergencies, just like the threat of a nuclear holocaust is round the corner: be it tinned foodstuffs or fuels, it’s also ammunition, weapons and bog rolls too. World War Z virus apocalyptic scenarios and general world pandemonium panic immediately spring to mind.

Scenes of school age kids, brandishing weapons and dressed up in militant uniforms, instead of the tools of learning and play are not reassuring either. We are not preparing them in the Western world for what some powers are secretly harping at in their secret agendas.

J’accuse the younger generations as being the “playstation generation”, of not being capable of thinking without tech or perform without tech, when fire can be made by rubbing two sticks and information researched also in plain books without the ease or speed of Google!

Am so thinking we have given up, favouring the quick and easy fix instead of the character building ways that sorted the weak from the strong. Muzzling in the statement on facts is just like denying  freedom of speach.

Those modifying societal behaviours are textbook supressors of reality of the grim Orwellian kind. The quick branding of messengers by deriding them or the thoughts and observations made doesn’t cancel events from history or manage to muzzle other minds to voice things out. Fact remains, the liberty of speach is the right to tell people simply what they don’t want to hear.

Enough from me: I’ll end my rant here for now, as too much negativity is bad for the soul and spirit! Yet, read more from Prof. Stephen Hawking on this link in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/01/stephen-hawking-dangerous-time-planet-inequality?CMP=fb_gu)

But, heck: I promised more here and this is one effort!