The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
I’ve gotten to the place where I try to avoid the news, headlines, even talking to people because there is just so much negativity out there. It’s not even fear. Most of what’s out there, that is what the MSM media chooses to ‘share’, is just plain craziness. I find it difficult to remember a time in my lifetime where people grew progressively crazier and that their descending into even greater craziness gave them a sense of power and security.
My husband and I used to drink that “there has to be something in the water”, but you have to rationalize that this distinct type of craziness is rife all over the world. To many people, living life today for many human beings is truly “the very best of times”. But then again, it is also, simultaneously, “the very worst of times” for far too many other human beings.
How did we get here? Are we so insecure that we must collectively destroy the lives that we currently enjoy, just to ensure some type of ephemeral security? The hate speech that flows from the mouths of the men and the one woman that seek to be the Republican nominee to run for president is not so shocking. The Republican Party has disseminated its brand of hatred against fellow Americans for several decades now and as an unconscious society we go about our daily lives as if nothing is amiss.
The tragedy, nee, tragedies that have stunned the world, heartless and unnecessary attacks against the innocents from Kenya to the very streets of America and to the City of Lights, Paris, are each individually and collectively unconscionable. It is achingly painful to read or be told about the rants on FB or Twitter where people selfishly proclaim that their losses are ever so much greater than another persons loss of the same or greater magnitude. Wake-up people, death is final for everyone and the pain of loss can only be endured by those that experience that inexplicable and gnawing emptiness that fills the minutes and the hours in the days after the shock wanes and the reality grips the soul.
Somehow, and I sincerely don’t know how to change people’s hearts and minds, but somehow we, we must find ways to recognize our shared humanity, our shared vulnerabilities, our inescapable march towards death. When we will begin to notice that some people are selfish and some are mean and, AND those people do not care about the rest of us? We can call those people ISIS or Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Putin, oh god, the list is endless and yet we in the west who are so prolific at identifying the “evil doers” in far and distant lands somehow miss our own little homegrown disciples of hate and injustice. Oh, we Americans have a talent for looking back through the annals of history and then identifying some of our craven despots. Tricky Dick ala Richard Nixon springs to mind and then the man who appeared to be unhinged by the possibility of communists among us, Senator Joseph McCarthy and in the minds of the bible thumping, ultra-conservatives, that evil Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that paragon of socialism that saved our economy and in turn, millions of lives.
We claim to be a Christian nation and that our ideals are based on Christian morals and yet we good Christians hate, we good Christians feel its morally right to bomb abortion clinics and to kill the people that work in said clinics. It’s okay to allow poor children to go to bed hungry most nights and to suffer with poor health and bad teeth because in our modern Christian world, God and Jesus Christ clearly hate the poor and agree that their suffering is necessary. In modern Christianity we are not, NOT our brothers keeper, especially if that brother is black, brown, Muslim or any woman who does not recognize that her place is at home having babies, cooking and cleaning for her man!
I, like many others, am exhausted, tired and disgusted by the constant pettiness, the embraced meanness. And to what end? What afflicts this great nation of ours is something greater than ignorance. It is like a great malevolence descended and no one knows how to raise this vale of hatred and mistrust that shadows our every motive for humanity?
