In looking over the news in today’s or any day’s paper and listening to the voices of “reporters” reading someone’s condensation of big stories down to little sound bites, I decided that the more things change the more they remain the same.  In fact, the only constant is change.  But is there really change?  I have come to believe that conflict is the constant that is, perhaps, brought about by change.

Just in the reportage of new deaths caused by war or by greed there is nothing new except, perhaps, by the contestants or the victims.  One could use the example of our unending interest in contact sports where the game is constant, only the numbers on the jerseys change.  The games go on endlessly in season as does the current war and privation continues in impoverished countries.

We humans are a nosy people.  We want to know what is going on everywhere and we have the technology to see all and hear it all at the same time anyplace.  What we should be doing with our information about this war and privation and endless deaths is to do something about them.  But, most of us are comfortable enough to thank our Gods that it is not we who are dying as a result of war or starving because the land has been laid waste.

It sometimes seems like throwing cosmic dice.  Who shall die by hunger or who shall die by poisoning?  Who shall die by all of the possible ways we humans try to better ourselves at the expense of others?  There does not seem to be a plan put into action by the “creator” of the universe.  The ills and cankers of the small, puny actors on the world’s stage seem to have no purpose - even if it were to be instructive and purposeful to make the world a better place in which to live, work and prosper.  But there seems to be too much randomness and no plan at all. 

We would hope that the leaders we elect would present a proposal that we all could agree upon to end conflict and put in place new, safe ways to use energy to make all peoples content with the “stuff” they all seem to want even if they have enough.  The people who have the most and the people who have the least live in the same space.  They come into the world naked with nothing and go out of the world naked and cannot take their accumulation of wealth with them.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.  Our pursuits are a voyage from here to there and along the way our plan is to get more and it is just too sad that so many have so little. What, if anything, can we do about it?