What if the most dangerous belief we hold… is that we still have time?

I don’t think there are many who haven’t already reached the same conclusion, even if we try to deny it—that as a species, through our actions and our silence, we have crossed a line from which there may be no return, and that a price will now be paid by all of us.

I am writing this from Cambodia, less than four hundred miles from an open field in Vietnam where several of my comrades died fifty-seven years ago, defending a small stretch of land outside Da Nang—now praised as Vietnam’s most livable city for tourists and former soldiers alike.

Yesterday, five soldiers were killed and thousands of families displaced near Preah Vihear, Cambodia, in border fighting with Thailand—only a few hundred miles from where I live.

Have we learned nothing at all?

This morning, the news showed fishing boats in flames on open water. Videos circulate of people being beaten, of children fleeing rubble, of bodies carried through streets that once held ordinary lives. Language that once shocked us has become common. Violence has become content.
Life now plays like a continuous, rated-R broadcast, and we watch from a distance, convinced it is happening somewhere else.

I don’t see a way back.

The gods humanity created have lost their authority, and the institutions that once restrained us have been hollowed out—overtaken by spectacle, power, and fraud. What once offered meaning now competes for attention.

The blood-soaked fields on which Da Nang was rebuilt may yet serve as a lesson, but no better world can be raised until the ground is allowed to dry—from blood already spilled by us.

DARKNESS IS COMING

Would that this moment might still last,
Till the dawning of the day,
Holding darkness in its grasp,
And what must come, delay.

Had we listened to the warnings,
Had we heeded what was clear,
Had we stopped the endless warring,
We might not be standing here.

But the darkness now is coming,
And the time is drawing near,
When the earth begins its trembling,
And hearts are ruled by fear.

For the gods that we created
Will fall from thrones on high,
And the truth at last conceded:
Their promises all were lies.

Forsake us not, O Life Eternal,
As darkness veils Your face,
Let us not be overcome—
Sustain us still by grace.

For You are our Creator,
And Your presence lives within,
Keep us through storm and danger,
Till a new day dawns again.