The Editor of the Guardian, Mr. Abraham Ogbodo
I remember today my biology teacher in secondary school, the great Patco (Patrick College) Emineke of blessed memory. The topic was irritability, which is one of the seven characteristics of living things, and in the process, Patco introduced this big word called ‘tropism. He then added a prefix ‘geo’ to arrive at ‘geotropism’ which means movement (of plants) towards earth (gravity). He said while the root of the plant would yield to gravity and grow towards earth, the shoot would take to the sky in search of sunlight (phototropism).
In a different lesson and under a different subject, my geography teacher, Mr. Ononibe told me that the features of the earth are not constant and that over time, sometimes millions or even billions of years, movements occur in the crust of the earth that recreate the continental boundaries, global vegetation and topography such that mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, oceans, deserts and the entire ecosystems will be reformatted and possibly relocated and the American continent for instance could be relocated from its current location to the Sahara Desert or into the Pacific Ocean.
Aah! It sounded like a fairy tale; too strange to be true! Did it therefore mean that the network of streams in my community had not always been there? I prayed to God that night to allow one of such earth movements to happen in my life time so that I could witness the relocation of America into the Pacific.
In the university, my sociology teacher told me that sociology as a discipline evolved effectively after the industrial revolution in England, which redefined the production process with dire consequences on the human condition. Machine started doing what humans were doing. The soil was no more as attractive as the machines and the migration to cities to seek livelihood in the emerging industrial economy generated new set of challenges that changed society and a whole field of learning had to be created to study these changes and proffer methods to maintain conducive social order.
Truly in life, there is no condition that is permanent. It is the reason I do not accept this end-time position of Christendom and I ask for forgiveness. The current global strife cannot be a fulfillment of the scriptures in the book of Revelation that the end-time will be preceded by tribulations of a scale that is already manifesting. Recorded history tells us that the world has never enjoyed absolute tranquility. The world had been troubled long before Christ and has remained so since Christ left more than 2000 years ago.
The history of Europe is also the history of wars. Twice, in 1917 and 1939, Europe had made its own wars become World War 1 and 2. In pre-colonial Africa, greatness was determined by military conquest. The great empires of Western Sudan and the tropics were great because their armies plundered, killed and brought others into subjugation in an uncontrolled reign of territorial expansionism.
Man prides himself (and I guess it was how God purposed it) as the height of God’s creation. But how it is so difficult for man, with all his intellectual and spiritual advantages to be at peace with himself is difficult to fathom. I will say here that man, in spite of himself, has so much to learn from the jungle where life is essentially predatory with the lion and other big cats at the top of the brutal order.
And the lesson is this. In all my observations, I have not witnessed where the lion or other predators engage in willful annihilation as man does. The lion kills to eat not to conserve and when it is filled it can fellowship with preys without posing any danger to them. Man on the other hand is propelled by vanity not necessity to disrupt and destroy the creation of God.
How can this be adequately explained? Not even Darwinism offers a complete answer because man’s propensity to destroy just to feel cool is a narrow, if not wrong interpretation, of Charles Darwin’s theory of Origin of Species and its derivative concept of the Survival of the Fittest or Natural Selection. In the jungle and in Charles Darwin’s mind, survival does not mean absolute destruction or even territorialism but adaptation to changing natural and social conditions to ensure sustainability.
Man has failed in this regard. Europe, which prides itself as a super race divinely ordained to dominate the universe equates destruction with dominance. The race had maintained an order of unceasing strife in search of dominance until the end of World War II in 1945 and when the United Nations was formed through mainly the instrumentality of the United States to create a new order for Europe and the World.
That order has run for 72 years and paradoxically, Mr. Donald Trump, the new American president is calling for its review or more appropriately, for a return to pre-1945 status quo when might was a national duty and stronger nations could arm themselves to the teeth to inflict maximum pain on weaker nations. This is just one interpretation of Geotrumpism.
Another is the enormous effort at racial profiling to place the peoples of the world in geo-political compartments such that the Caucasians, Mongoloids, Arabs, Africans, etc., do no cohabit to achieve a common human purpose. The resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), neo-Nazism and supremacist sentiments generally in American politics since the coming of Donald Trump explains this. Humanity is no longer a common denominator under Trump and the Whites genuinely have a responsibility to protect their own against others. It is left for others to protect theirs against the Whites. The consequence of this racial protectionism/exclusivity is a divided world where God Who offers all the connections will be disconnected and pushed to the background.
It is a frightening prospect but that is where we are or going with the Trump presidency. Why then should the world fight to put down ISIS if all they ask is a protected caliphate they can call theirs? How is the ISIS revolt different from the event in the last one week in Charlottesville in the State of Virginia, United States?
If Trump can say America and Americans first and heavens are not falling, why should heavens fall if Kim Jong-Un says the same thing regarding North Korean and its people? Blind nationalism was never an exclusive right of the Germans under Adolf Hitler neither is it going to be of Americans under Donald Trump. The North Koreans are equally entitled, same as the ISIS. That should be the true meaning of a Free World which the Americans love to talk about.
I return to my teachers. The earth, perhaps, was not created by God to remain constant or uniform. There are contentions that force a mutation of the physical, social and anthropological elements of earth now and again. I suspect we are at one of such points with Geotrumpism.
But God is still good all the time. That is why the devil is offered all the time to retrace and be good before Armageddon. I am saying it is not too late to create a fresh stimulus and pull back from Geotrumpism onto a more beneficial path and save the world from imminent cataclysm. We can also choose to remain in the direction of Trump if this generation has finally agreed that there is nothing to learn from the lessons of history.
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