If you're conflicted about the future? Perhaps here's the reason why ...

Call me a melancholy baby boomer, fortunate enough to be beyond the premium stages of a long life.

I have no regrets, but I feel like I've lived the luxury of nestling safely between two world wars.

I'm expecting another world war before too long.

The events leading up to the last world war look too familiar.

In the 1930s a great Asian nation, Japan, and Germany in Europe were rearming.

In 1940 Japan had 5.5 million under arms and Germany six million.

In an era of unbelievable strides in military technology, where targets can be hit with pinpoint accuracy, China in 2021 has 3.4 million under arms and Russia 3.6 million.

So, you see, the world is poised for Armageddon on at least two fronts, not to mention the Middle East.

Russia has divisions of troops massed on the border with the Ukraine.

In July to mark the centenary of communism, China's president Xi Jinping gave a speech, ironically in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, where Chinese troops rampaging in tanks and armoured vehicles butchered thousands of student pro-democracy protesters in 1989.

In his speech the president sabre rattled - "Resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China's complete reunification is a historic mission and an unshakable commitment of the Communist Party of China... No one should underestimate the resolve, the will, and the ability of the Chinese people to defend their national sovereignty and territorial integrity."

Both Taiwan and the Ukraine are flash points.

We always thought the next war would start in the Middle East, but the grass fire just got a whole lot bigger.

Russian president Vladimir Putin tells lies, because he can.

Both he and president Xi have ensured they can remain president of their countries for life.

Last year popular Russian opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent.

He was taken to Germany and put into an induced coma.

He recovered, returned to Moscow, was arrested at the airport and eventually jailed in a penal colony for two years on trumped up charges.

It is assumed Putin ordered the hit and had Navalny jailed after he survived the poison, simply because he can.

Putin has accused the US and NATO allies of aggressive behaviour on the Ukraine border, even though the biggest contingent of troops in the vicinity are his.

I haven't started on the Middle East and Iran, or North Korea.

I half-expect the next war will start with a dirty nuclear device smuggled into some US city or Europe, even Australia.

Perhaps I'm too gloomy about it.

But you can't ignore the rhetoric of these totalitarian buffoons.

You would think these assorted dictators would know the worthless, Pyrrhic consequences of blowing each other and their populations back to the Stone Age.

Yes, but you would have thought the same of the European powers after the Great War to end all wars in 1918.

They returned like punch-drunk pugilists to the same battlefields 21 years later.

The hope is that the old Cold War stalemate called "détente" would prevail, where both sides realise there would be no winners in a conflict, so they lapse into a nervous state of well armed co-existence.

My youngest grand daughter, Juniper, is still a baby.

If she lives to old age she will have a very good chance of seeing in the new millennium.

Given the lightning pace of technological change I have no idea what her world will be like in 2090 and whether it will be liveable, or she's part of a new colony on another planet, long after Earth died.

There's a chance she could be speaking Mandarin or Russian or a Middle Eastern tongue because we lost.

Maybe the super-spread of future pandemics will become like global mega-twisters, overwhelming the health systems of entire nations.

Maybe a nuclear winter will become a blessed relief from a world gone mad and overcrowded. I'm glad I won't have to find out.

Believe me I'm a happy little Vegemite, but God I'm fed up with this world of endless politics, the corruption and the obvious inability or refusal of bullying, belligerent nations to respect their people and live in harmony with neighbouring states.

War mongering leaders exhibit a perverted inhumanity, a bizarre conviction that you have to kill something in order to save it.

So next Saturday, Christmas Day, is like a mild sedative.

A brief respite where we thank God for small mercies, getting smaller.