Menuka Dissanayake, Period 7, 3/7/24

Menuka Dissanayake

Period 7

04/30/2024

Modern Mythology 2024

The World at Peace?

The world is at peace, or at least as much peace as possible with humans running the earth. Never in the vast history of human life has there been a time with so many alliances and so few deaths caused by war. At the same time, there has never been a time when the Doomsday Clock is so close to midnight. Even at the peak of the Cold War when the stockpile of 80,000 nuclear weapons shared between the two superpowers could shatter the earth into oblivion, the Doomsday Clock was nowhere near what it is today. One could say that even if it became one-tenth of what it was in the 1980s, they have become nothing if not a thousand times more powerful. America alone has the power to wipe out a few continents off the face of the earth. But that will never happen. The US will never fire nuclear weapons if not for retaliation; hopefully. The world only has to worry about the few nations that do not follow conventional methods, and even France, which has a warning shot policy. I mean, who fires nukes as a warning?

Especially since we are in a period where people are so used to peace, we rarely hear about war being fought on today's global stage, though that does not mean there is a total lack of it. The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza are prime examples of such conflicts. And we should be even more worried since Russia and even Israel possess a surprising amount of nuclear stockpiles.

The US, ever since the creation of the Nuclear bomb, has been a pioneer in ensuring that the dangerous weapon will never again be used as a weapon of mass destruction and only be used as a bargaining tool and deterrent. One could argue that the only reason that there will never be another world war is because of the threat of nuclear retaliation, or because the world would not exist after World War 3. Any sensible person would not want the place they call home to be destroyed because of their gain.

And of course, the world is not filled with reasonable people; if there were, there would be no need for armies to exist. My home country, though it lacked weapons of mass destruction, proved to be one of the countries filled with more unreasonable people than their opposite. The people have been the death of my country. At the turn of the 20th century, it had the chance to become one of the most prosperous countries in South Asia, but unreasonable people and people that allowed for such let slip that chance. The 30-year civil war in which both sides participated in genocide does nothing but reinforce my ideals. Even still, I long to be there and hope to retire there one day. In the end, even after living in the US for more than 5 years, I am one of the unreasonable people. My only hope is that my home country frees itself of the cancer that runs throughout its heart and becomes what it could have long achieved, a country filled with reasonable people.

The United States seemed to embody that ideal since its inception, however, some recent events have brought concern that the United States is progressing or regressing toward a place I never wish it would. The situation may be exaggerated as it is usually on social media, the country seemed to be following in the footsteps of other countries, especially my own. The political system seems to be heading in an eerily similar direction. People are divided by the basic ideals, officials hanging onto their posts with dear life, and the inability to empathize with the “other side”. This was something that I never thought the US would descend. How can the US be the ideal that it is and be the peacekeeping force that it is when it is developing to become a laughing stock on the world stage? How can one of the reasonable people who have been keeping the unreasonable people at bay become their own worst enemy? This is when the famous quote by Aesop, a Greek storyteller, comes to mind, “United we stand, divided we fall.” I hope for the betterment of the future that one of the global nuclear superpowers becomes another of the possible candidates for this world's destruction.