I don’t want to read the paper anymore. Seriously. This time, it’s just too depressing. We’ve got a bona fide dipshit in the White House who seems to go well out of his way on every occasion to do something colossally stupid, the Christian Taliban has said dipshit’s ear, half the country’s actively homophobic, the climate’s going kablooey, and it would appear a large portion of the Middle East is intent on blowing itself the fuck up (no help to the Dipshit in Chief). Just a random list. Eh, lessee. Russia’s effectively a totalitarian regime again, religious nutbags in Iran are getting The Bomb, authoritarian nutbags in North Korea probably already have it, and all the rest of the nutbags desperately want it. We don’t hear much about Sub-Saharan Africa these days, but word has it maybe half the population there lives somewhere between “desperate” and “well and truly fucked”.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
You know those people they call “Cassandras”, or “Chicken Littles”? I don’t want to be one of those people. I used to think those people were crazy. Probably they still are. However, the notion that our species will eventually, either through gradual dumbfuckedness, or perhaps in one relatively acute paroxysm of shit-for-brainedness, land itself in a near-universal World of Hurt doesn’t seem all that far-fetched anymore.
Hey, humanity: Knock it the fuck off, will you? Pull your fucking heads out of your asses. I promise to try to do the same. We got a deal?
I don’t know how old you are Loopy, but for reference, when I was a kid there was a similar list of worrying problems that people fretted about. And here we are 30 odd years later with a whole NEW list (though the ME was a worry even then) that has people once again fretting. Looking back, my own folks had things THEY were fretting about as well…and theirs, and so on. In 30 years maybe you can look back at a whole new set of things to keep you up at night.
That pretty much sums up my view of it. If we’re going to hell in a handbasket, I can’t stop it. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may be nuked.”
Besides, I figure my chances for surving the apocolypse are slightly better than average. This over-confidence helps me to sleep at night.
These guys are bad news now, but I think it’s only a matter of time before the Religious Right eats itself. I think it’s already starting, actually.
Which is the least homophobic it’s been in our nation’s history, and every time they do a new poll on the subject, it’s a smaller fraction of the population. Half the country being homophobic is progress.
But people are finally starting to recognize this, and there’s a lot of tech on the horizon that can help reverse it.
Which it’s been doing at regular intervals for the last two thousand years. People still live there, but even better, you and I don’t.
But East Germany isn’t, and the Soviet Union is gone for good. On the balance, the Cold War still ended in such a way as to benefit most of humanity.
Okay, I can’t polyanna that one away.
Which is bad, but it’s not exactly a recent development.
Anyway, yeah, things are bad, but they could be worse, and they can still get better. It’s not the End Times just yet. Things may suck, but tomorrow’s still Friday. That’s something worth looking forward to, right?
I can. NK gets terminal, and Beijing takes them out before they can knock over China’s wagon. Iran steps up the rhetoric, and Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the rest ask China to take them out too. If China wants to maintain their burgeoning economy, then they are going to need a stable supply of oil. Iran threatens that stability. Sooner or later they will realize that.
In the 90’s we had genocide in Rwanda. Before that the killing fields in Cambodia. When the Soviets were still around, there was the invasion of Afghanistan, the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, the crushing of the Hungary in 1956, and the forced famines of millions.
Go back a couple of generations and look what those people lived through. My grandfather was born in 1912. He lived through a flu epidemic, began raising a family in the midst of a major worldwide depression, saw two world wars, a cold war, the Korean war, Vietnam, and lived most of his adult life with the knowledge that civilization could be obliterated at any moment. His children did ‘duck and cover’ drills under their desks in preparation for nuclear holocaust.
There’s always something. The threats we face today are many, but they aren’t existential threats to our very existence.
On the other hand, the world is more chaotic now. So new threats appear all the time. And we have a 24 news media which feeds off this stuff and yammers at us about it 24/7, and an internet where we can all get together like this and wring our hands about it. My grandfather’s generation read the paper once a day (if that), then went about living their lives.
It’s easy to get caught up in it with the constant bombardment of bad news. I dreamed last night that we were being bombed and I was climbing through rubble and trying to hide from more blasts. I’m sure I had that dream because I’ve been following the news pretty closely and talking about it with friends and family quite a bit. So, it’s time for a little break from that.
Not that you want to be an ostrich, but letting yourself be all anxiety-ridden won’t change anything. You’ll just be suffering and frustrated because you can’t do anything to change it. Easier said than done, I know, but there it is.
And when you need a break, this is the perfect place for it. I found the anal beads thread in MPSIMS to be a nice diversion this afternoon.
You little wusses. Back in the 70s and 80s we’d have laughed at North Korea threatening us with their nuclear arsenal. Eight bombs? Nodong is right. And didn’t anyone tell you Kim’s a girl’s name? Thirty years ago, the Soviets had so many bombs that Brezhnev used to lose eight or more a week just due to poor filing. The Soviets were ready to launch a separate ICBM at every man, woman, and child in the United States on twenty minutes notice. And then blow up everyone in Canada just because they didn’t believe they were really a different country.
I have been in the same frame of mind as the OP of late. I suppose it has as much to do with me as with the world. Still, the parallels with the 1960s are remarkable.
Environmental concerns, a tar-baby of a foreign war, economic uncertainty, a rise of Nativism/racism. Overseas, the world seems intent on dismantling decades of progress.
I tell you sometimes I think the world is going to hell in a hand basket.
You know, the odd thing is I really don’t have any anxiety at all. Back when I was a kid, and we were watching The Day After on TV, and my fellow Mainer Samantha Smith was writing letters to Andropov asking him politely what the fuck his problem was, and our president was calling the Soviets the Evil Empire, and Star Wars was our insanity du jour, well, then I was a bit anxious.
I’m not at all scared. “Resigned” is more like it. That may be worse. Someone who’s scared is getting surprised, perhaps because they expected something better.
Seems to be the solution. Pretend it ain’t there, because I can, because I had the thoroughly unearned good fortune to have been born in the US, where, for all practical purposes, I can shove my head as far up my arse as I like, and wherever the bombs are falling, there’s a vanishingly small chance they’ll be landing on me.
Yeah, I remember growing up in the 60’s and 70’s with the EEEVILLL COMMIES.
It seemed like every other day, you would would hear Walter Cronkite (Who was the Voice of God back then) talk about the Russkies and the Iron Curtain.
Hell, in school, we had more Bomb drills than fire drills. In our schools, it was get down under your desk, put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.
Some of the richer people in the neighborhood had bomb shelters in their backyards.
Not to take anything away from the BS happening in the world today, but every generation has its demons, and somehow we muddle through.
