I had a conversation the other day with a friend who was expressing the anxiety that many of us are feeling but maybe aren't willing to admit to. We are terrified out of our minds about Ebola and ISIS. Time to admit it. I replied to my friend that what is really making us scared is two things:
1. We know too much
2. We don't have the resources that we need at hand to properly deal with and absorb what we know.
I think it is always helpful to try to maintain a historical view of things. If palaeontologists and archeologists are correct then our species has been walking the earth for maybe one hundred fifty thousand years, give or take. We discovered agriculture only ten thousand years ago. We developed writing and metallurgy maybe four thousand years later. Fifty-five hundred years later a man named Gutenberg invented the first printing press. A few decades later first Copernicus followed by Galileo determined that the earth is not the centre of the universe. Two hundred years later the steam engine was invented, then came factories and trains, and electricity and the whole world was known to the whole world so that one hundred years later they fought the First World War and we already had cars and gasoline and other petroleum products and airplanes, then movies and radio and the Second World War just didn't end human civilization and before you knew it every home had not only a radio and a telephone and a flushing toilet and real toilet paper but also television and a refrigerator and a gas or electric stove and then three years later we were up in space and there were more of us than ever and in ten years they were visiting the moon and everyone lived in dread of nuclear annihilation because we had learned the secrets of the atom, and don't get me started about microwave ovens. Within the next quarter century we were blessed with the World Wide Web then five years later it was the Twenty-First Century and every middle class home had at least one computer and you could email or Skype for free anyone in any part of the world. And we all had little cell phones that got smaller and smaller and then became computers with full internet while we carried each with us entire music libraries available through two white little ear buds and now we have instant coverage of all the bad horrible and scary news all over the world but especially those carefully selected items that the multinational corporations and our governments that are controlled by them want us to fixate on which leads me back to the current crisis of Ebola and ISIS and the coming Armageddon, as if we don't have enough to worry about already.
The last two hundred years have seen more rapid change than the previous ten thousand years; the last decade more than the previous century and the beat goes on. We still lag behind the pace of change that keeps dragging us along. We are still far from developing the ability to absorb and digest and adapt to these sudden changes. The human organism is not adapted to such rapid change and progress.
We live in a state of perpetual mass shock and panic and I think this is the best possible time to begin to disengage without totally turning our backs on this rapid state of change. We can do nothing to control Ebola outside of taking common sense health precautions and in the less than likely chance of it occurring here in Canada we are going to have to learn how to deal with it and live with it while making every effort to combat and triumph over it. And without fear. Likewise with threats of terrorism, if they indeed occur on Canadian soil and this is still going to be a big if. We have lived and survived through worse times than these but we have also gone soft from a long period of uninterrupted peace and prosperity.
Meanwhile it is also helpful to keep before our eyes the question of why they want us to focus on these two issues right now when there are equally important and grave events occurring in our world. What are they trying to distract us from? What do they want to siphon our energy away from? Perhaps the environment? Efforts of working towards a more just and more egalitarian society? A more peaceful world? Now is the time if ever there was a time to ask ourselves and each other these questions.
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