We are living in a time of constant & troubling change. Oceans, already polluted, are rising; the planet is warming; Social Security and Medicare are near depletion, and endless wars across the planet threaten our survival. Surely North Korea or China or Russia or some other nefarious government is eager to destroy our way of life.
These fears are compounded by conflicting truths and realities. Somewhere between Fox and MSNBC, somewhere between Facebook, Instagram, and Artificial Intelligence, are opinions that can be altered as easily as images can be morphed. Civility is gone and we’ve lost faith in the integrity of our leaders. Definitely, this is the worst time ever. The end must be near.
But wait! It was only a few years ago that COVID was ravaging the planet. We were all told to wear masks and distance ourselves (once we overcame the mysterious shortage of toilet paper in the market). Seven million people died. That was the worst.
But other fears were on the horizon. Maybe it would be race wars that brought us down, or unbridled technology, or rampant immigration or abortion…everything around us seemed to point to our demise. But it didn’t!
And in the 1950’s the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal was pointed at us. ‘Duck & Cover’ became an inane expression. None of us would survive a nuclear war with weapons 100x that of Hiroshima. The world would be burned to cinders. Absolutely the worst time.
A decade earlier we faced Pearl Harbor, World War II, the Holocaust, and the detonation of the first atomic bomb. In that five-year period almost forty million people were killed and we knew the end of the world was just around the corner.
The emotional trauma of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Nearly one-third of the workforce worldwide was unemployed. Hopelessness was all that was on the dinner table.
And one can go back millennia when the Dark Ages reigned, when the Black Plague killed one-third of Europe’s population, when volcanoes exploded and covered Pompeii and Herculaneum.
We may finally be correct that mankind has ultimately succeeded in being able to destroy the beauty and magic of the planet Earth…but somehow, no matter how close we’ve gotten to that precipice, we step back, opting for one more day, one more week, and, who knows, maybe that constant approach to the apocalypse is what defines man.
Tomorrow it all may be clearer…we don’t’ know. What we do know is that tomorrow never comes!