Roger Varley has been in the news business almost 40 years with The Canadian Press/Broadcast News, Uxbnridge Times-Journal, Richmond Hill Liberal and Uxbridge Cosmos. Co-winner with two others of CCNA national feature writing award. In Scout movement over 30 years, almost 25 as a leader. Took Uxbridge youths to World Jamboree in Holland. Involved in community theatre for 20 years as actor, director, playwright, stage manager etc. Born in England, came to Canada at 16, lived most of life north and east of Toronto with a five-year period in B.C.
The world needs another Solomon
At 3 a.m. on Monday morning, I went shopping at Zehr's.
It was a rather surreal experience, given that I was the only person there, save for a cleaner, three men stocking shelves and one lonely check-out person. It was almost akin to being in a modern zombie movie and I half expected Woody Harrelson to step out of one of the aisles and hit me with a shovel.
But it also hit me that there I was, just me, surrounded by thousands of square feet of food. Just about anything I could want in terms of digestible goods was only an arm's reach away. And yet, half a world away, in Somalia, hundreds of thousands of people are starving amid one of the worst famines to hit Africa in decades. Tens of thousands have already died.
As if the famine isn't bad enough, however, Islamist militias with their vehement anti-Western fanaticism are doing their best to prevent food aid from coming into the areas of Somalia that they control. Even worse, they are killing and otherwise preventing famine refugees from leaving the area.
A number of years ago, an estimated 300,000 Somalis died of starvation in another famine. This one could be even worse.
So what do you do? Western governments are attempting to bring food aid to the stricken area, but with the various warring factions in that benighted country posing a danger to everyone, they can't be sure that any of the food will ever reach the desperate mothers and children who need it.
My knee-jerk reaction is to have the United Nations, the United States, anyone, send in a massive armed force to wipe out the warlords who plague the counthosethe poor bastards who, through no fault of their own, are caught up in this never-ending cycle of poverty and violence and bring some kind of stability to the region. But it's been done before, with devastating results, as recorded in the movie Black Hawk Down.
Just as it has been done in Afghanistan, also with devastating results, where it is only a matter of time before the Taliban and their warped sense of right and wrong return to power and use that power to once again subjugate the powerless. The intervention of Western forces has not eradicated the Taliban, but merely sent them to their caves where they can wait for the inevitable departure of said forces. Then they will be back at it, throwing acid in schoolgirls' faces, stoning women to death and hacking limbs off thieves.
There are other nations of this ilk that come readily to mind: Burma – (I refuse to call it Myanmar) – where a military junta rules with an iron fist and is unlikely to hand over government to civilians any time soon; North Korea, the ultimate experiment in mass mind control where an entire population is held in literal slavery; and Zimbabwe, where you either idolize Robert Mugabe or you're on his death list.
Looking at these countries, it's always the poor wretches who are merely trying to keep their families alive who suffer. Their only crime is to have been born into poverty in a country where all sense of common human decency has been buried to the advantage of those who hold the guns. And the only way to stop the ones with the guns is to send in someone with more and bigger guns. But that only continues the cycle.
It seems to me the only way to solve these horrible situations is for another Solomon to step forward. But that's not going to happen. There can only be one Mozart, one Shakespeare, one Michelangelo, one Solomon.
Tell me, am I wrong?
