My thoughts exactly, TD.

Here we are, on the cusp of year 2017, and yet we as a race show ourselves to be amazingly without compassion. Those who would rather take a world view, recognizing that what is true for others is true for ourselves and, therefore, speak out against nationalism and chest thumping and self aggrandizement, are met with derision and tagged with sophomoric labels. Especially in this forum - many posters here are seemingly educators with no real education - no matter what they claim.

In my mind there is no way to justify the mass slaughter of innocents. The Tokyo fire bombings were not mentioned in one of your posts, but that's another glaring example of such slaughter. (2000 tons of incendiary bombs over a 48 hour period - killing up to 200,000 innocent civilians and injuring nearly as many and displacing a million people - non-combatants, men, women, children, the elderly, the sick and the very, very poor.)

More bombs were dropped on the civilian populations of North Vietnam than had ever been dropped in the history of warfare; that is, if you took all the bombs ever used and piled them in one pile, it would not match what was dropped on North Vietnam. Much of it wasted actually because the Vietnamese developed an excellent network of tunnels and bomb shelters. Nevertheless there were many lives lost, but hey, that's okay, eh? After all just a bunch of dirty commies and barbarians.

Humanity, as a whole, will never fully wake up. Technology is the new opiate of the people, as the planetary puppeteers continue to manipulate us all and we become less and less concerned about the absurdity of borders and the notion that they are they and we are us.