What went wrong

I suppose it all started to go horribly wrong 70 years ago, when the War was on. They upped the ante, they took things to a new and demonic level. They exponentially increased the horrors. Horrible pollution, horrible violence and horrible illness.
I was brought up after the War, but more particularly after the bomb. A single hit of that thing and a million dreams go up in smoke. I think my generation of ‘baby boomers’ were the first to feel very afraid. Suddenly there was a chance of total planetary annihilation.
This marked a great ethical leap backwards. Not just the bomb but the simultaneous arrival of the first factory farm. With the bomb and the cage, each stimulated by war and privation, came a new sense of security. The bomb brought safety from war, the factory farmed animal brought safety from hunger. After the war there was food aplenty. And during the ‘cold war’ that followed there were many tests to perfect the atom bomb. There was plenty of everything!
Now, seventy years later, if we have little hope for the future it may be because we’ve let science rage unchecked. We’ve applied what science has taught us to the point where we simply don’t have a future. How many people actually focus on the future when doing things? Even more crazily - how many of us are beginning to ask the ugliest most defeatist question of all: “Do we really deserve a future?”
Here’s where we stray into the absurd, for it’s not actually about what we deserve. (Human destiny is not actually any more significant than termite destiny) The absurdity here concerns other ‘bystanders’, other species do. THEY deserve a future, and would have one were it not for the fact that we, humans, knocked down the forests, caged the animals and caused climate change. If we are intent on continuing being destructive beings our life here is over and this place should be left to the completely innocent creatures.