Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Open just about any newspaper (except for our happy little publication) and you'll see more and more examples of the world going mad.
Whether it's natural or man-made news, practically every page has something to be severely disturbed at.
Today alone I've read news of an alleged constitutional and political coup conspiracy, a man's decapitated head rolling 35 feet down the road after a particularly gruesome hit-and-run, female gangs of prostitutes going around mugging people, a possible mass exodus of pilots on the national carrier, details of an assassination more appropriate to TV drama than real life and in Europe 60 dead as a result of severe storms. And, all this on the front page, before even opening the paper.
The news on the inside isn't much better. Laws that allow rapists to get away with their crime, child kidnapping, ecological destruction and earthquake misery with more than 700 dead.
Take a look at the international stage and there are 60 feet high wildfires raging through the Australian outback and Ugandan witchdoctors promoting child sacrifice and the burying of body parts as ways of attracting riches.
A snapshot of 24 hours around the world.
Natural disasters are pretty much beyond our capabilities to avoid although I can't help thinking that if global warming had been taken more seriously years ago, we might have had fewer incidents now. However, not knowing enough about the science of it all, I can't say that with any certainty.
The rest of the madness though is man-made and people somewhere had to make conscious decisions that have led to the state of affairs we read about day in, day out.
To touch on each and every topic would take much more than the column inches I have to write in but I do want to touch on one point.
By far the most gruesome is the idea that children are sacrificed and mutilated in the name of money but this is going on in Uganda and the fact that I had to do quite a bit of digging just to find the story means that it's not even much of a priority on the world stage.
Tragic, but true, if things don't affect us personally we tend not too bother with it.
Once described by Winston Churchill as 'the pearl of Africa' Uganda has been a poor country for a long time.
Its economy is now growing rapidly and a relatively wealthy urban middle class life is fast growing, but the poor are still as poor as ever and education minimal in rural areas meaning that while the death of any child is a monumental tragedy, there are those who just don't know any better and, as a result, are the perfect patsies for unscrupulous and severely disturbed individuals.
Little consolation I suspect for the mother that dug up the headless body of her 18-month old baby in a nearby field, but who cares, right?
