Are You Scared? Should You Be?

A year of terrible things, but…

Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

There is a 1960s song whose chorus proclaims: darkness, darkness. Those were turbulent times for certain, but today the darkness seems to hit closer to home on a daily basis. In my case, the racist killing of ten and wounding of three at a Buffalo grocery store (11 victims were black), was only miles away. Ukraine seems closer than most of the wars on the planet because Ukraine looks a lot like places where we in the US or Europe live.

These kinds of disasters seem more real to people like me, more imaginable.

There is a definite racial, economic, and geographic bias going on here. If I look further than my myopic West-centered news sources I see a world where there is more bad than good, everywhere.

Yet, somehow, I remain a believer in humans.

It is strange to be optimistic in an apocalyptic world. But it is only in the human world that things appear apocalyptic. Nature runs on its own set of rules.

Last night I watched a Nova program on PBS that broke down, minute by minute, the effects of the asteroid hit that destroyed the dinosaurs and much of life, millions of years ago. It focused on an area in Oklahoma that is rich in the remains of sea creatures and dinosaurs, 2000+ miles from the epicenter of the collision between a seven mile diameter rock and our planet.

The picture, right up to when the shockwave reaches that region, around 17 minutes after impact, is of a natural world going about its business of living. Dinosaurs do dinosaur stuff, tiny mammals scour the forest floor for food. An idyllic scene done in excellent CGI.

There is no awareness of what is on its way. But human consciousness did not exist then.

It is our human fate to see the slow wave heading our way.

The prime example of this is global climate change, but there are many others. Here in the US we are not asked to do anything on a personal basis to help deal with this, the equivalent of a super slo-mo asteroid hit.

There is no movement, as humans, to personally change any of our habits. Nothing.