Date And Time

Somebody get me a calendar! This is 2015, right? We are living in the twenty-first century and we have devices in our pockets that allow us to connect with others across the globe at a moment's notice, providing they have paid their bill. We fly from one continent to the next with contempt for the fact that we can't use those cellular devices while we do so. 2015, and we have a twenty-four hour view of the world that keeps us up on all the world's events, including who got bumped from Iron Chef. We drive around in hybrid cars, smug in the way we are saving the planet, and then cheer when gas prices fall below three dollars a gallon so we can drive more. We have the technology to create longer-lasting batteries that could power any number of life-saving devices and we insist that they put them in those cellular devices that we can't use on the giant sky bird in which we fly to other continents using fuel that we should have given up decades ago.
2015.
Right here on this blog, I complain bitterly when Americans shoot one another. Sometimes by the dozen. I try and understand what sort of madness would possibly feed the beast that makes such horrible things happen. When innocent victims are killed for standing near someone when they go off and create another tragedy for the United States. And wonder why the media won't let it go when I can't shake it myself.
2015.
This past weekend, Boko Haram gunmen on horseback galloped into three villages in northeast Nigeria. Sixty-eight people were killed in Borno state Friday night and another eleven were shot in two other villages on Saturday and Sunday. Not by the dozen here in Nigeria. By the score. Nearly four score, if you need an easy American conversion. Boko Haram, if you are unfamiliar, is an Islamist extremist group operating in Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and their home base of Nigeria. Maybe they're not getting the press that some of those other flashy Islamist extremist groups, but they're out there, wreaking havoc like you might expect an Islamist extremist group to do. On horseback. In 2015. Welcome to the future. Where everything is the same. Only worse.