We came to the War Room next.

      The wall outside the entrance had only one painting, the painting that the guide had referred to, The Colossus, a scene of lightening, thunder, and chaos overshadowed by a giant naked man with a clenched fist. The giant dominates the sky in the painting. Would Sylvia link this painting with the Ice Age on the present horizon, instead of Napoleon, as the guide had suggested we should? I wondered. "This brooding colossus is far more crucial to our collective survival that you may think," I was going to say. "Emotions tend to stand in the way of what needs to be done to survive in his presence. The solution to the Ice Age is not found in fighting one-another, or in dreaming about global warming, but is found in taking the crucial steps that need to be taken for our civilization to continue in a radically harsher world." It didn't seem necessary to say that.

      "We all want our civilization to survive in the coming Ice Age," I said instead. "Also, we all know that the Ice Age is coming. And we know too that in the coming Ice Age climate much of our agriculture will collapse unless we build the vast technological infrastructures that are required to assure our food supply by shifting agriculture indoors. In order to build these infrastructures we need vast resources of metals and energy, and to create those resources we need to develop nuclear fusion power, and in order to accomplish that we have to revamp and uplift education to promote the learning of the art of making discoveries of universal principles, and so forth. Each one of these elements involves huge processes," I rambled on, "all of which are possible, but which all go totally against the grain of our present practices and beliefs, while every one of them is absolutely essential for our civilization to survive in the coming Ice Age. If we fail, between eighty and ninety percent of humanity may die at the feet of the colossus once its cold climate devastates our food supplies. And even then, while the dying begins, mankind will keep on fighting wars in the background over the few food resources that remain."

      It seemed that Sylvia was no longer listening.



      The War Room paintings were gory scenes of blood and death, and executions. But worse were the etchings related to war, the scenes of insanity. One etching showed a savaged tree 'adorned' with naked dead men, their bodies bound, decapitated, arms cut off, all hanging from a branch that also held the severed head and severed arms just hanging there, their hands reaching to the sky from nowhere to nowhere. Wonderful Heroism! Against Dead Men! was the title of it.

      "That's the situation that we face again as society, Sylvia, with the Ice Age on the horizon," I said quietly.

      "The situation is unavoidable if we don't act," I wanted to say. "The Ice Age is coming. It could start next year or a hundred years from now. Some people suggest that it has started already since some glaciers are already getting larger again. What would empower us therefore to act like human beings for once and to save our civilization and our existence? We have known for decades that we face another Ice Age and that our food supply will thereby dwindle to small amounts if we don't act like human beings in defense of one another. Ironically, nothing has animated us so far to take the required steps to assure our continued existence on this dynamically changing planet of ours. Nothing has motivated us. Nothing has moved us. We literally sit back and wait and hope that we can magically get by and live without food. So tell me, Sylvia," I wanted to say, "what is the missing force that would get us off our butt and inspire us to act as human beings? The lives of nine-tenth of humanity are at stake. In addition, we have to act fast, because time is running out." I didn't say any this. I said nothing at all.

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Stories about  Healing from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche