End of days?

No, I'm not talking about the appearance of the antiChrist or anything like that. I'm talking about a feeling that people must have felt just before Genghiz Khan's or Alexander's army rode into town on their horses and burned everything to the ground.

This time instead of swords and arrows, a lot of people are about to be put down by a weapon many times worse.

That weapon is called greed.

Why do I say its worse? Because with a sword or arrow, its all over in a few seconds but with greed, death lingers, sometimes for years. The torture caused by greed, such as losing everything you had through scams like Madoff's, I think, is a fate many times worse than death.

Its kinda depressing but I just felt the need to lay it out, just to remind myself of certain things.

If humans are set up for a target practice, then it looks to me that we are being shot at from at least 3 directions.

First, the greed of man that led us to this economic and environmental crisis. Its been said many times, our planet can support our needs but it can't support our greed. But like many cool slogans, that's as far as it gets. A slogan.

You see, greed is not only confined to people who read ads. Everyone's greedy. The poor grabs everything to climb out of their poverty. When they wreck the environment in the process, we say you have to understand, they're poor so its okay. Once out, they grab some more to climb up to middle class. Once there, they grab some more to become rich. Once rich, they grab some more to become super rich. And so on. Along that journey lies a million broken hearts and broken dreams, plus a climate that's wrecked beyond repair. But we just can't help ourselves, because we all want a piece of the pie.

Second, the greed of man that leads him to crave dominance over his fellow man, turning lands of intelligent people into banana republics and banana republics into dens of pirates and murderers. Instead of becoming more global, earth's communities are becoming more insular, each convinced of its own superiority. The world has gotten a lot less friendly in the last half century I'm told. Barriers are coming up everywhere and you are being tracked in cities and on networks. More and more of our decisions are based on social status, our ability to commit violence, our race and creed. We need to feel superior and the way to do it is to dominate those we perceive as inferior.

Third, the greed of man that leads him to a craving for conformity so intense he's willing to kill in its name, even die for it if required. This leads to the scourge of extremism marked by waves of genocide and killings of innocents, the lust to spill blood for no other reason than the fear of diversity and differences in opinion. As the world modernizes, intolerance spreads, exported to all corners of the globe by the tools of modernity.

So tell me, with guns trained at you from 3 different directions, even if you ran as fast as you could, what are the chances of you dodging all the bullets?

Oh the planet will survive all right. I'm just not sure about its inhabitants.

Tuth be told, there's been times when I wished I could be Superman so I could set things right. And then I woke up. I realized that even the greedy wished they could be Supermen too so they could set things right - their way. Perhaps I have to accept that no force in the universe can tame the hearts of men. Not even kryptonite.

Clock's ticking. Its only a matter of time.