The State of Nature

I've been reading Aidan Hartley's book The Zanzibar Chest. I couldn't put it down once started and once finisished started bawling. The horror, misery, and destruction of life in Rwanda and Somalia overwhelmed me. In my heart I wondered how people could do such horrorific violence to their neighbors, yet in my head, I knew the answer. Human nature is depraved and prone to evil. Here's one passage from the book:

The city was a fragment of what it had been but the atmosphere was electric. The militias had liberated the nation not only from dictatorship but also from modern civilization. A Dionysian orgy of destruction was now taking place across Mogadishu in which everything was smashed within the space of hours: priceless Muslim artifacts from the museum and the mosques, hospital equipment, factory plants, power cables, computers, libraries, telephone exchanges. The Somalis thoroughly enjoyed themselves and I got a contact high off them. On days like this in the news business I grew to understand how easy it must be for normally ordinary people to want ot participate in riots adn football match hooliganism.

A queue of civilians was huddled at a roadblock before a gang of rebels. As each person was waved through, another came forward and began uttering a litany of names. My guide with the flaming red hair said the people were reciting their clan family trees. The genealogies tumbled back generation after generation to a founding ancestor. it was like a DNA helix, or a fingerprint, or an encyclopedia of peace treaties and blood debts left to fester down the torrid centuries. I was thinking how poetic this idea was, when bang; a gunman shot one of the civilians, who fell with blood gushing from his head and was pushed aside onto a heap of corpses.
"Wrong clan," said my flaming-haired friend. "He should have borrowed the ancestors of a friend."

What infuriates me about this is their delight in destroying, in tearing down. The casualness with which they kill. It takes but a few moments to obliterate what took centuries to build. I wonder how many of those brutalized by this civil war think they are better off now than when they were under colonial rule. Since "liberation" from the colonialists, their quality of life as descended dramatically to where they are now living out Thomas Hobbes description of the state of nature: "The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." No rule of law, no beauty, no clean water, no life. They simply exist waiting for the day they die.

Where is God in all this? Perhaps He is waiting for one heart to turn towards Him. One heart that acknowledges the evil and wastefulness of the present situation and cries out to God to end it all.

It's been over ten years and to this day Somalia still doesn't have a real government. The new Transitional Federal Government is trying to step in; however, they haven't been able to move to Mogadishu the capital of Somalia since warlords still control the city and don't want to give up their power.