It probably looks like I am shooting my mouth off with my posts from the past few weeks but in fact, there are a few things I won’t be talking about at least for a few months yet. The waters are already muddy enough with some subjects. I keep avoiding certain subjects and plan on staying on track because some things are best left unsaid until the dust settles. Just to change the subject. When the war on terror started twenty years ago, I remember that the whole affair was a slow-moving crisis and people had predicted the collapse of the US and its power base twenty years ago. In hindsight, you could probably imagine the US and its allies taking a different approach and possibly relying more on home security. Although fighting a war isn’t just about winning but also logistics. If you can control certain supply chains you can turn a profit here and there. There is money spent on weapons but this also helps shareholders. Not to forget selling opium to pharmaceutical companies and controlling the supply chain.

The flood of opiates in the US marketplace turned a profit. If you only have ineffective social solutions that are not that expensive you can have a number of crises play out and make money while on the surface it looks like you are doing something. It seems like I am being cynical yet I also know that there are people who do genuinely care and try to help. Yet if you have a system that is meant to turn a profit from war and continuing social crises you see that you can make money from quite bad social problems. Take into consideration weapons sales as one example. I am sure weapons are profitable. Yet they also cause social damage. That then will inevitably turn a profit somewhere down the line. At the end of the day, people already know how the system works. It isn’t that they don’t care it is just that they can’t really change it. The best way to deal with multiple crises is to continue diverting the issues. There are a number of ways to do this. War is a good one because it will bring people together. If the US hadn’t started the war on terror it could have been quite bad for the administration at the time. People could have become angry that there wasn’t a more aggressive approach to such a big attack on US soil.

So in some ways, the US administration themselves could have seen a possible collapse of their own power from a protracted war but also seen the effect of multiple crises and the possibility of turning profits from good logistical control. The US has lost quite a few wars but has always had good logistics. They basically have air control which makes a big difference to what they can do on the ground. I think watching this crisis play out for twenty years really wore me down. I used to feel depressed when I heard of civilian casualties and eventually the news landscape changed and you stopped hearing about these things. You would occasionally see a devastated city in photos and hear of some well-meaning street artists travelling to war zones which I also found quite distasteful but I won’t get stuck into that subject at the moment. When one crisis stops you are guaranteed another one soon enough. I like the work that Scotty Marsh the street artist made a while back which was his ‘Merry Crisis’ painting featuring Australia’s PM in a Hawaiin shirt after going on Christmas holidays during the biggest bush fire crisis in recorded Australian history.