People are easily bored/distracted. Too many bullet-riddled buildings and bomb-blasted sand dunes and we want new distractions, and so while the fighting and dying goes on in Libya, we are more enthused/enthralled with the horrors in Japan, brought on by the huge earthquake and the devastating tsunami. Now with the threat of a nuclear reactor meltdopwn, the media,( especially the 24 hours cable news) are hyperventilating, trying to "feed" us the rolling cars and boats, the crushed buildings, the fast-moving/ unrelentingly destructive wall of water and from time to time some heroic incidents.
There is a lesson to be learnt here, if you are a long-serving autocrat, faced with a revolt. Wait, play for time , call out your security/armed forces and pulverize the "rebels", while the rest of the world wring its hands in despair, caught between their vaunted democratic values and their connections ( past and present), to these same autocrats. Listen to their confused ramblings, watch them race each other to condemn and fulminate and then watch the hopelessness creep into the heroic people who dared to dream of a better day, who took up arms to usher in those better days and who hoped and prayed that their pleas for help will be answered by those who encouraged them and who boasted about the great promise that is "democracy". Watch their hopes die and watch them, as they turn away and embrace their only comfort, their religion.
We will rue these lost opportunities and we will be punished. Once again the feckless politicians have been true to their nature and we are the worse for it.
There is a lesson to be learnt here, if you are a long-serving autocrat, faced with a revolt. Wait, play for time , call out your security/armed forces and pulverize the "rebels", while the rest of the world wring its hands in despair, caught between their vaunted democratic values and their connections ( past and present), to these same autocrats. Listen to their confused ramblings, watch them race each other to condemn and fulminate and then watch the hopelessness creep into the heroic people who dared to dream of a better day, who took up arms to usher in those better days and who hoped and prayed that their pleas for help will be answered by those who encouraged them and who boasted about the great promise that is "democracy". Watch their hopes die and watch them, as they turn away and embrace their only comfort, their religion.
We will rue these lost opportunities and we will be punished. Once again the feckless politicians have been true to their nature and we are the worse for it.
