The Sky is Falling

Oh, dear. I really try to be upbeat; to see the better things in life. There is of course an infinite number of good and positive things to talk about: gratuitous kindnesses and stunning bravery and kittens and puppies and the smell of baking bread. This is the way life should be, and the fact that it is not so to the degree that I want and expect it to be casts me and other frustrated romantics like me into the role of snarling curmudgeon. All the good in the world is still offset by the infuriatingly incomprehensible and stupid things we humans insist upon doing to one another.

As a species, we have struggled for several thousand years to improve ourselves; to use our unique gifts to rise ourselves up and reach our potential. But in the careful creation of our society and our culture, we have created a Frankenstein’s monster in that what we have created is now threatening our very humanity. The old adage that “fire is a good servant but a terrible master” increasingly applies to our society, which is increasingly taking on its own power to the detriment of those who created it.

The bible was railing against Mammon a couple of thousand of years ago, and we all know how effective that was. Of all human emotions, the one that most strongly rules our society today is greed.

As recent events in the financial markets have proven, our entire world is built upon and is increasingly fueled by money. There is a growing gap between individual human beings and the culture in which we live…and which we, of course, have created. And as this separation continues and grows, guess which of the two elements, humanity or culture, forges ahead and which increasingly lags behind?

This morning I saw a news item saying that there is a new generation of parking meters which, the minute a car pulls away from it, flips back to zero so that the next car can’t use the remaining minutes! Oh, dear LORD! Just how cheap and moneygrubbing can we get? (This is a rhetorical question, since all any of us need do is look around to see ample evidence of the answer.) People are dying of disease and hunger, global warming (which of course is a myth as our beloved leader tells us), wars, poverty, unimaginable suffering and deprivation, and we spend money on designing a parking meter that will make the city using them an extra nickle?

And the most maddening thing, for me, is the knowledge that all my ranting, and raving, and arm-waving, and jumping up and down, and screaming at the top of my lungs does absolutely no good. It’s yelling into the hurricane, of trying to leave footprints on water. There is no worse feeling than that of helplessness and absolute lack of control.

Quite likely the sky is not actually falling. Somehow we have managed to muddle from disaster to disaster, calamity to calamity…always with the clock at one minute to midnight, always with Armageddon just around the corner, and we have somehow survived. Thus far. It’s almost enough to make me concede the existence of…something pulling the strings, writing the rules we cannot possibly understand. Whatever it is is not the benevolent, loving God of Sunday school, however, but a capricious, often petulant, totally unpredictable entity which takes delight in playing cat to our mouse.

So the sky may not, indeed, be falling. But it’s coming closer every day.

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