Summer's Almost Over - Why Aren't We Dead?

Is there a paycheck involved?

I trawl through the conspiracy websites, read the books, listen to the words over the airwaves. I hear ten million horrid things, all coalescing outside the field of vision, behind the curtain where Big Brother does his dirty, danky, and dangerous business. I watch and I wait for the coming of the end of days.

But yet I don't see the end anywhere near.

All I see is all I've ever seen. The world looks worse every day, in foresight, but even worse in rearsight. The world we inhabited a day, a month, a year, ten years ago was teetering on collapse, with real problems suppurating underfoot and the apocalypse just ahead, waiting to claim us all.

That's where it always is, after all.

I spent my childhood with Soviet missiles pointed at my hometown. Any day, with one mistake, one error, one Khrushchev Screwdriver too many, we could have been white noise in the skies. It could have ended then and there with raging heat and unbearable, smothering cold, and there were times when we went to bed wondering if we'd wake up the next day.

Oddly enough, we survived.

We survived even though the televangelists told us the Beast was coming. We survived even though the hippies told us the man was out to get us. We survived even though the spiky hairs told us there was no future. We survived even though the movies, tv, and fiction told us the future was going to be an irradiated, grim stew of Blade Runner skylines and Mad Max countrysides.

We survived it all, then, in spite of Big Brother's evil plan to eat us all up like chocolates.

So is now any different from then? We have Islamic terrorism instead of Communist domino theories, and guess what? Both are doomed to worm around themselves and fall over time. We have economic collapses and fake bubbles, but guess what? We've always had them, too, as far back as anything. We have unrest and worry and anger and fear.

But then, if we didn't, we wouldn't be human.

So I guess this means we're not doomed, after all. I guess this means we're just going to have to go back to our lives and live them, and our jobs and work them, and our responsibilities and live up to them. I guess this means we're going to have to resign ourselves to watching and making the news for the next however many years. I guess we're going to have to get President Obama to sound like Candidate Obama, again, and keep the left and right establishments on their toes.

I guess life is going to go on as normal, at least for another year.

So I plan to spend that year solving the problems I can do by myself, and helping others see ways to solve problems that need help from on high, or from the group. I plan to spend that year making certain elected officials hear my voice and heed it, even if they can't always agree with it. I plan to spend that year making some noise, in my own way, in my own time.

What are you going to do?

Make a good choice, my friends. The future is where we're going to spend the rest of our lives, and it's only as good as we can make it, together or alone.

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