On Perpetual High Alert

We've become a society ever on the alert for dreadful occurrences. Things that we cannot possibly avoid. Dread miseries that haunt our waking hours, residing deep within the worry-area of our very guts. We seem to stumble in a state of helpless disarray from one potentially threatening possibility to another. And it quite seems that the media is having one hell of a good time, bringing the low-down on all manner of disasters - man-made and those foisted on us by nature - to our attention, constantly.

Those with a sanguine disposition, or who don't pay attention to the urgently breathless news of the day, or who prefer to just shrug off what they hear as utter nonsense, are really ahead of the worry game. These are the people who refuse to submit to the dire alerts, the urgings, the warnings, the Jeremiads among us. Those who proffer themselves as the critics of society, the experts on natural disasters, the intelligence agents who have a deep knowledge of the deranged mind.

Much of society has descended into a slow, agonized dependency on the news of the day, catching our breath with alarm as each new signpost of our inevitable journey to extinction - man-made or natural - is brought to our avidly fearful attention. Much as it frightens us and depresses us and diminishes the quality of our lives, we cling to these harbingers of gloom and doom as our modern-day prophets of end-of-world finality.

The abyss may not be where we think it is, we may not be edging toward the cusp of that dark, soundless, hollow edge toward nothingness, but we're obsessed with the certain thought that we do face the apocalypse. If not from a newly-identified and deadly virus conceived as yet another pandemic, then from the spectre of nuclear winter, or other deadly attacks by rogue governments or free-agent raging terrorists.

You'd think we'd be grateful for a break in all of this, yet the most popular films appear to be those that build upon our fears, presenting doomsday scenarios even our fervent imaginations helped ably by classic disaster writers could never visualize, chilling us even more thoroughly into a state of catatonic dismay. Our minds are on overdrive, we seem to have become unwholesomely dependent on gloom.

There well may be some reason for concern, but despair and panic, perhaps not. It is as though we've become collectively infanticized, or at least brought back to our early teen years, revelling in this fascination with misery and depression. And allied with that a kind of dependency on it, as though without feeling breathless with anticipation over some disaster heading straight for us, and unavoidable, life has no excitement, adventure, appeal.

Of course a sense of crisis in society isn't all that surprising, given the very real and fairly constant threats emanating toward many societies from fanatical, socially-averse and psychopathic linked groups of self-heralding terrorists, Islamist jihadists who take very seriously indeed the chaotic morale-busting they have brought to bear through their insistence on proving how odiously capable they are of delivering death on a grand scale.

There is another crisis of social confidence in the manner in which we encounter and deal with nature's continual evolution in the atmosphere and our close environment. Nature is always in flux, climate has always undergone gradual alterations, environmental scientists are not able to quite understand what propels them, quite apart from the fact that the human animal degrades nature and abuses our surroundings.

We've become an earthly population of ultra-aware, grief-stricken victims, fearful of everything that surrounds and threatens us, uncertain how we should respond and proceed. And as a diversely huge race of beings, of quite intelligent animals, we're capable of far better than that. The first place to start, though, is how to deal with one another, and we still haven't figured that one out.