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Bleak or rosy? The future is - as always - a choice of pathways. As so many a wise world teacher has mentioned: traveling the narrow and difficult path will lead to salvation; traveling the wide or easy path, will lead to damnation. This is evident even in our own lives. Take a young adult, trapped in poverty and inequality, fermenting his mind into one that reacts prime-evily with anger when challenged; striking down his enemy with stick and stone, his hands of blood leading him into a life of misery, spent in small confined spaces, dreading the nights when passed around for sexual favours. When this same young man resisted his primate instinct, resisted the alpha-male brain reaction to threat, he would have walked away in shame of his peers for an instant in his life; but would have been rewarded with freedom.

In the larger scale of things, humanity - at present - is choosing the wide path of materialist consumption and shallowness of soul. Life is 'easy' now: driving our status anxious egotistic economy on 64 million year old sunlight (oil), destroying relentlessly as we over-consume our natural resources; our spoiled PlayStation saturated children pushing away a half-eaten dinner, consisting of a poor animal who had to pay for its life, its destiny that of rotting in vein on some landfill site. Our glamour and glitter filled shops, built upon an empire of misery, where children are made drug-addicted soldiers, fueling plutocrat pockets with conflict diamonds. In willful denial, the famous and fortunate create a status anxious mob, desperately clawing their way to the top, fueling this consumptive cancer we have become. This road leads only to one place: damnation.

Damnation will then be: a world void of forests and natural resources, famished children killing each other for a morsel of rotting food on a landfill site (as already happening in certain cities of South America). No more glamour and glitter; no more half-eaten plates of food that can be pushed aside; no more violent PlayStation games that devour the mind of savoury thoughts.

It is seen in the mythology of the ages: civilization grows; civilization becomes cruel and arrogant; gods are angered; civilization perishes - from the Deluge Story of Noah (found in different versions of almost all parts of the world), to Sodom and Gomorrah to the tale of Atlantis. When a civilization becomes cruel and arrogant, it perishes forever. This is evident in all previous civilizations: Egypt, Greece and Rome...all reduced to dust and bones as the remnants of these empires fled to some other part of the world to continue their vicious cycle.

But our current civilization is global, consisting of 6.6 billion egotistic consumers, sucking dry the planet that has nurtured them for millions of years. If our materialist empire crumble this time - which is an inevitable certainty due to our 'track record' - where will the scatterlings flee to then?

Humanity needs to choose the narrow path as soon as humanly possible; the path of ethics, altruism, reason and accountability. It will not be easy, as the right thing to do has never been easy. But it is the only way for humanity - our children - to survive...

Learn more about this author, Jean Erasmus.
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