Ball of Confusion
Round and round and around we go — where the world’s headed, nobody knows.
“Great googa mooga, can’t you hear me talkin’ to you?”
Ball of Confusion — The Temptations, 1970.
The song was written over half a century ago, yet it could have been released this morning.
“Fear in the air, tension everywhere, unemployment rising fast”… Sound familiar?
Back then, the lyrics captured a world on edge — racism, war, corruption, economic despair — the social tremors of an age that believed it was on the brink of change.
But the more things change, the more faithfully we repeat them. Every generation looks around and believes it’s living through unprecedented chaos, that surely we’ll learn this time, that surely the next generation will do better.
And yet, here we are — still spinning on that same dizzying axis of conflict and denial.
The stage keeps changing, but the script never does.
The Long Arc of Our Own Undoing
Spin the wheel of time, and what you’ll find is not progress, but pattern.
Between 1500 and 1799, humanity fought so often and so ferociously that peace seems almost the exception. Empires rose, fell, and rose again, drenched in blood. Europe tore itself apart in religious wars while preaching salvation. The Thirty Years’ War alone left entire regions barren, its soil so soaked with death that the living could no longer till it.
Farther east, dynasties clashed over divine right and ambition. Across the oceans, the so-called Age of Discovery unfolded, discovery for some, annihilation for others. The conquest of the Americas, the slave trade, the relentless expansion of empire, all carried out under banners of God, King, and Progress. The tools changed: swords to muskets, cannons to rifles, prayers to manifest destiny. The purpose did not.
Three centuries, thousands of conflicts, all for power, pride, or the illusion of permanence. And yet, every era believed it was the enlightened one, that the bloodshed was the last necessary purge before a better tomorrow. But tomorrow came, and it looked disturbingly like yesterday.
Fast-forward to 2025
We have satellites, supercomputers, and self-driving cars, but still no cure for cruelty. We livestream war crimes in real time, then scroll to the next distraction. There is another genocide unfolding, not in some distant medieval past, but , now, , with the complicity of governments who avert their eyes, and media that softens the edges of atrocity so it fits neatly between ads for luxury watches and skincare.
We like to think we’ve evolved, that the savagery of the past belongs to men in powdered wigs and chainmail. But the truth is simpler, darker: we have only become more efficient at destruction.
From the arquebus to the drone, the evolution of warfare has mirrored the evolution of our excuses.
History doesn’t repeat because we forget. It repeats because we remember, but refuse to change.
The Century That Perfected Killing
The 19th century arrived draped in hope. New worlds, new nations, new ideas. Yet the blood kept flowing, only now it had railways to carry it faster.
Across the Americas, expansion meant extermination. Entire Indigenous nations were erased under the banners of Manifest Destiny and progress. South of the border, revolutions promised freedom, but too often delivered fresh tyrants in different uniforms.
The American Civil War, brother against brother, industrialized slaughter on a scale the world had never seen. Cannons, railways, amputations, mass graves. And when it ended, we called it necessary.
Europe, meanwhile, played chess with colonies. Africa was carved up like a pie at a banquet to which no African was invited. The “Scramble” they called it, as if genocide were a game.
Then came the 20th century, the age of enlightenment, the machine age, the century of reason. And yet it birthed the most organized destruction in history.
World War I turned fields into oceans of mud and men into statistics. Twenty million dead. “The war to end all wars, ” they said. Twenty years later, we were at it again, louder, faster, deadlier. World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, proof that we don’t evolve; we innovate.
By mid-century, we had split the atom and the world. The Cold War followed, not peace, but a long, frozen standoff where fear itself became currency. The bombs sat waiting, like gods we built but could not destroy.
And then came the endless wars, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine. Pick a decade, pick a continent, you’ll find a war. The pretext changes, the weapons change, but the justification remains: freedom, democracy, national security, words polished enough to hide the profit margins.
War became not just a tragedy but an industry. A self-feeding organism that sustains economies, wins elections, drives innovation.
If there isn’t a reason for war, one will be invented. The propaganda machine hums efficiently, selling the lie that violence can still be noble, necessary, redemptive. And we, obedient consumers of outrage, buy it, again and again.
Now, in 2025, we’ve watched another genocide unfold in real time, pixel by pixel, headline by headline. We know more, see more, and yet do less.
Every generation has believed that humanity would one day outgrow its appetite for killing. Yet here we are, centuries later, still sharpening our weapons and our justifications with equal precision.
Round and round and around we go.
Progress is our favorite myth; self-destruction, our oldest habit.
Words Have Power 