History's irony

So here we are in the year 2012, we humans on the planet Earth, except if you look around it doesn't seem like the 21st century at all, not with severed heads left on school ground doorsteps, not with jilted upset dicks pouring acid on pretty female faces, not with widespread ignorance and, worse, celebration of it as some kind of populist badge. But there are clusters of cultural progress, to be sure. Then there are disguises, hallucinations of progress. Is it less violent to exchange beheading an enemy for dropping a bomb on him from huge distances above?

There's an irony in progress. As we progress, as we get more humane, as we get more peaceful, we also become less skilled as warriors -- which makes us easy pickings for the next ignorant tough guy who chooses to beat the shit out of us. At least this was true in the days of hand-to-hand combat. Now we have technology and can take them, and everything surrounding them, down unless, of course, they nuke us first.

The best case scenario goes this way: this is all an illusion. Actually we're a theme park for the amusement of humane alien civilizations. I think it was Arthur Clarke who first came up with that.

No wonder CJ, my protagonist, hit the road.