A grotesque display of hubris

The euphoria of success in the recent midterm election for Democrats appears to have befuddled and poisoned their minds as beautifully highlighted by Mr. Marc Thiessen in his recent syndicated column in Southeast Missourian on March 3.

The President of the U.S. was on a noble mission to avoid future nuclear holocaust but on the same day and at the same time, his countrymen were busy in a sleazy extravaganza to drown his noble message and torpedo his lofty mission. The choice of timing was not coincidental. It was glaringly deliberate and the whole scenario appeared distasteful, unpatriotic and a grotesque display of hubris for which they may have to pay ultimate penalty of peripeteia.

Those who suffer from amnesia and have forgotten the tragic and catastrophic human carnage following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings ought to be reminded of the prophetic prediction by Albert Einstein: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

President Trump was in Vietnam trying to broker a deal on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The whole mankind had a stake in the President's success. He was indirectly giving human life a chance to flourish and blossom by dissuading a ruthless tyrant whose myopic gaze is just fixated on only one option of continuing nuclearization with distinct potential for future doom, destruction and extinction.

According to Alistair Horne, hubris is an attitude of excessive and foolish arrogance and peripeteia means a dramatic reversal of fortune. Otto Von Bismarck aptly and poignantly remarked, "A generation that deals out a thrashing is usually followed by which receives it."

DR. A. BASIT CHAUDHARI, Cape Girardeau