There is much going on in the world, events severe enough that they deserve respect and attention. The topographically distant, but via the internet, the ever-present war in Ukraine is the loudest of the events, and its end will spell out what the next era for Europe will look like. Tensions are rising once more in the caucuses. The country of Georgia (which borders Russia) is hosting military drills with Ukrainians and some members of NATO. The government of Azerbaijan (which also borders Russia) has decided to report on the Russian war crimes on state-run television, as Russian police murdered Azerbaijani citizens.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Poland increased its military budget by at least a billion dollars in the first year, and then in 2023 that number increased by eight billion dollars (as per trade.gov) and has continued each year to jump that number by the billions, and has since become the highest military-spending NATO member in terms of GDP. Of course, there is Germany, which people have asked to rearm, and they are. A year before the war, Germany spent 47 billion dollars on military defense, and now they are spending 88 billion.

Of the events nearest to us: President Trump’s mass deportation of immigrants, both illegal and legal, the ridiculous ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ which decreases taxes for what is left of the middle class and the rich, while increasing taxes on the poor, and also borrowing harder than ever from our children. (The Congressional Budget Office says in the first year, the bill will decrease the amount the lowest ten percent of U.S. citizens have available to them by $400 in the first year, and gradually over the next few years increase to $1600 per year loss).

The Epstein files and list are pretty insane: Ghislaine Maxwell was visited in prison by Trump’s previous personal attorney, and now she has remembered over 100 names, which were on a list that the President and his office had insisted ‘never existed’.

And because we are riding the wave of the wildest timeline (short of ya’ll voting me in as President of the United States, heh), there have been very recent military clashes between Thailand and Cambodia, who are now sending rockets screaming across their disputed colonial borders. Major General Winthai Suvaree, the spokesman for the Royal Thai Army, has stated that Cambodia has been amassing heavy equipment and soldiers.

The dispute began long ago when France was the colonial overlord of Cambodia and had delineated the border between the two nations, and then continued when the International Court ordered Thailand to withdraw its troops. The resulting deaths only harden the resolve of either nation, as well as inflame nationalism. If we look to Babylon, where the “eye for an eye” adage comes from, and see the deaths and revenge-killings that happened, no wait, I mean the Middle East. Israel and Gaza, Israel and Iran, Syria against Syria.

It’s like ancient, eight-thousand-year-old lessons just sit there, floating in the air to taunt human nature.

Be it imagined now, or in the past, when there was no electricity, just dirt right after its invention, and people:

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” said the blind man, to two young men who heard but did not see while they gouged out each other’s eyes. And there was a fourth man who held so much spite that he heard someone try to give him advice, and he hated being talked down to (in his opinion) and, in anger, gouged out his own eyes. But the old, blind man with wise words did not see those before him lose their sight, for he had been young once.

And someone somewhere came up with a scapegoat idea, to blame human nature on some invisible guy named ‘the devil’ who “told me to do it!"

Aye, so here we are in the year 2025 C.E. (or A.D.! No need to start a fight over that designation). Here we are with nationalism running like a wildfire over the surface of nations, scorching the surface of the earth with bombs and drones and blood. Republicans feel so wronged by Democrats that they are currently tearing out their own eyes to spite everyone else. Meanwhile, Democrats are looking for the nearest Independent to blame for not voting, while they write scathing presumptions and lambastments of everyone else online, not realizing that they, too, are blind. Instead of investing in allies and leaders in the past before Trump, they invested in social constructs developed in a university for rich kids and only cursed the existence of white-men everywhere for years — ah, I meant about a third (34%) of the U.S. voting bloc.

“Oh, why do the ungrateful, uneducated independents not vote our way?” Cried the Liberal from behind his or her coffee mug, all the while those forgotten about young boys saw someone who would accept them somewhere else. It wouldn’t even matter if their fathers and fathers’ fathers were evil, and someone sitting in their fancy ivy tower had written an essay or a book on why. In the end, they, like anyone else across the surface of the earth, are looking for someone to understand and accept them.

There, on some open range in the south of the U.S., some Hatfield or McCoy is stewing angrily about some death that happened at some time and rightly wants some sort of vengeance. Some Jewish boy in Israel lost his mother to Palestinian raiders, and when he grows up, he plans to take revenge. And some Palestinian boy will lose his father or mother or brother to that Jewish boy, and the whole world is destined to go blind.

So what will it be?

Are you Liberals and Conservatives bound to wrestle in the mud and tear out each other’s eyes for justified wrongs or not? To blame everyone else for your sightlessness while both of you deport, or push away potential allies?

In that dusty street in Babylon at the beginning of time, the blind old man listened to the senseless screaming as two young men fought and a third tore out his own eyes in spite; he listened because he could not see. Though he lost his eyes to a just and righteous cause and made sure his enemies were as blind as they surely deserved, he did regret all of the righteousness.

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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