Reading of the newest round of desperation in the Horn of Africa, the failed rains of Somalia, the floods of refugees pouring into Kenya, threatening to destabilize, once again, an unimaginably fragile region, I am brought to the words of Richard Kapucinski, and others who have preached the same lessons about the way things are. Can we ever learn from the past if the present is so powerfully blinding?
“People are not hungry because there is no food in the world. There is plenty of it; there is a surplus, in fact. But between those who want to eat and te bursting warehouses stands a tall obstacle indeed: politics...Whoever has weapons, has food. Whoever has food, has power. We are here among people who do not contemplate transcendence and the existence of soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day.” The Shadow of the Sun
