Horrible news (out of Las Vegas) this morning. We will all end up, I suspect, each hiding in their own hobbit-hole, venturing out for only brief forays to the few remaining brick and mortar stores and to go to work, and then back home to the safety of our cave.
I just....part of me is saying "This is it. The world has broken me." Ten years ago I'd be frantically casting on a hat or a scarf to donate somewhere, as some kind of a reflex "We can fight the bad with the good" gesture. But....I can't do that any more. I feel like it's futile (And anyway, most places want money, not stuff).
I gave some money to Harvey relief. And to Irma relief. And to relief for the earthquakes in Mexico. And yesterday, some to Mercy Corps, to help out in Puerto Rico. Is what I did having any good impact? I have no way of knowing. For me, this kind of thing seems purely symbolic now....I'm doing it because it makes me feel like I'm not so awful of a person; I have no idea if it actually helps or not.
I also have a bad feeling of foreboding. I'm telling myself this is just my reaction to the news but I'm sitting here right now with my office door closed (it is not officially office hours yet, I will open it in a few minutes, I guess). I hope I'm wrong about the feeling of foreboding. I've been on edge since the church shooting in Tennessee....which was just last Sunday, I guess. (And there were attacks on people in Paris and Edmonton, which have sunk below the waves of the news here in the US).
I don't know. I try not to believe that people are terrible but that's getting harder and harder as time goes on, and I've kind of lost any faith that any good I can do makes any difference. I will probably keep doing it because it's how I was raised, but it no longer brings me any solace.
I used to complain that I was never "happy-go-lucky." I know I used to be far more than I am right now and I wish I could go back to whatever level of "carefree" I used to have, when I had more trust that most people weren't scheming the demise of others and the world seemed less full of random horrors. Maybe this is what finally growing up feels like? I don't recommend it.
1 comment:
I pretty much stay in my hobbit hole. I could say it's because I don't like crowds, but mostly it's because I'm cheap. I take solace in the knowledge that there have always been horrible people running around loose doing horrible things. Now we have more people, so more bad things happen, and communications is better, so we hear about more of these bad things. But I suspect that the world is actually a better place now than it was in the good old days. Except for the oceans and the forests. Wish we could do something about that. Maybe Elon Musk is right, maybe we do need to colonize Mars. We get hit by big rock and all these disasters will pale into insignificance.
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