Slouching Towards Disaster

I was trying to get a break from all the disastrous news on television yesterday when I read an article in the new AARP magazine about Joan Didion. I was introduced to her work back in the early 1980's when I took a course in graduate school with John Clellon Holmes, a comrade of Ginsberg and Kerouac. At that time, the new rage in writing was beginning to be called "creative non-fiction." Didion's book Slouching Towards Bethlehem went on to become a modern day classic with its theme that the world is falling apart and that, basically, the center of it cannot hold any longer. Yet here we are, a number of years later, still predicting the same dire fate for us as a world community.

Just last night CNN on the Anderson Cooper show featured a short spot called "The Edge of Disaster." Instead of the usual question mark that all the cable news channels use these days, the title appeared to be simply a statement of fact. The viewer was treated to several possible hypothetical situations: perhaps a flood along the California coast, an explosion in Boston's harbor which would release poisonous gasses throughout the city, or even another gas attack on thousands of people in Philadelphia as they watched a Sunday afternoon ballgame. Has the world gone mad with its nightmarish suggestions?

I have been puzzled for a number of years on why educated people want to panic over what could possibly happen in the future. It was 1999 when I first started observing this phenomenon. Garlan and I had spent the fall in Alaska while I was on sabbatical from the small liberal arts university where I taught. As we began to sail south to Seattle on a weekend ferry, we began to hear more and more people talk about the computer Y2K meltdown ahead. We had done nothing to prepare our computers at home for such a disaster. Also, we noticed, and this was especially noticeable among our conservative Christian friends, that they were stashing away water and food for a six month period for the impending event. I am doubly perplexed by this behavior since both my friends (and, yes, even some of our close relatives) were prepared in this way. Do we not all believe that our lives are ordered by God? After all, we love the spiritual laws booklet in our faith that reminds us "God has a plan for your life" every time we open it.

I certainly do not want to be a "do nothing" person either and slouch my way, unconcerned, towards disaster. But then--I remember Dale Carnegie's book that is very dated now but still has some applicable advice it seems. He spoke these words: "Ninety percent of the things we tend to worry about we have no control over, ... It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep." It seems to me that the answer to the dilemma is to be alert, to be prepared, and to trust. The rest is in His hands.