Strength or Futility?

We were watching a film this afternoon that we were aware of but which neither of us had seen, despite it being twenty years old now: 'Children of Men', a dystopian view of a world of universal human infertility set in the UK of 2027. The riots and violent state oppression, the subtext of refugee migration; the destruction of property outside of the gated community occupied by the protected elite and the rule of martial law seemed to us as a an entirely plausible but a [maybe not too] distant reality here in the UK; but by coincidence, this afternoon I had taken delivery of this month's New Internationalist, which served to remind us that these violent dystopian situations are the norm for millions of people around the globe. Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, Gaza, and so many more countries and regions, whose people are estranged from normality by the violence and war imposed on them either by outside forces or by their own people for whatever twisted purpose they see fit. And the reasons for any or all of this? Prejudice and the irrational fear of 'the other' fuelled by money; economic xenophobia, amplifying our incipient native tribalism into the mass destruction of people and property for no real, and certainly no good reason and definitely not to the benefit of the 'family' we still cling to: our own precious species. Mankind. What on earth do we think we are doing? I once produced a large charcoal drawing of a huddled figure whose head and face were largely obscured by their folded arm and enlarged, foreshortened hand, clutching their knee. Although now lost, this image stands in my mind as a representation - embodiment, even - of the pain and suffering of so much of humanity at the hands of our own kind. We are apex predators feeding on the carrion of of our own species, slaughtered by our own hand...