August 18, 2007

• What sort of worries keep you up at night?

  When I was a kid, this question plagued me. I grew up during the Reagan/Bush era, so all I ever worried about was whether or not there was going to be a world to grow up in. I suppose kids probably feel the same way, what with the so-called War on Terror. I blame my fear of what the future held for my lack of motivation in school. Why bother with curriculum when by the time you’re an adult, the world might be in ruins? Instead I researched vitamins, herbs, and nutrition, ancient history, symbolism, and survival techniques. If anyone asked me about my weird (for that age) interests, I just said I planned to be a writer and a writer writes what she knows. It was at least a partially honest answer since I like to write and would be overjoyed to someday be a professional writer. The ancient history and symbolism might seem like odd studies coupled with the other more useful information, but I felt that not being a particularly athletic person, if the world ended but I survived, the survival information -herbal and nutritional- might inspire someone else to keep me alive, while knowledge of the past would allow me to keep human history alive for future generations.

  I still think the world might end… maybe tomorrow. Who can say? I still don’t trust our government, or should I say, the Religious Right who control the government. The Nazi SS has been exchanged for the modern RR. The only thing that has changed since I was a child is that the RR is a lot more honest about their motivation. It’s no longer a cold war… it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of the “end times.”

  I just worry about the end of the world for different reasons now. Mostly I worry because I have a little nephew, and I wonder what kind of world will he grow up to? How big are the holes in the ozone going to get? By the time he’s grown, will we be taking conservation efforts in the oceans as seriously as those on land? There are already dead spots in the ocean from industrial and agricultural runoff. Did you know the ocean provides a hefty percentage of the world’s oxygen? Some say, more than the rainforests do. What would happen if we succeeded in killing the oceans and the rainforests? We’re well on our way… when my nephew is an old, old man, will people even be able to go outside or will we all live in enclosed bubbles which keep air in and UV rays out? I’ve read scifi novels and seen movies to that effect. At the rate we’re destroying and corrupting this world, I don’t think we even deserve this beautiful place. I just read an article about the murder of apes in Africa. Why do people do that? It’s not enough we kill each other for no good reason, we have to kill our closest cousins too? We’re scum… if we all died, in some ways it would be a good thing. Sometimes I think my nephew would be better off if he never got to grow up. Better he should die before these worries plague him too and he becomes as frustrated as I am with the world’s leaders.

  Beyond these world encompassing worries, I think about my job sometimes and making ends meet, but compared to my primary worry, these almost seem petty. Why worry about them when we might not even be here tomorrow or in a month, a year, or a century…. wiped out by an ecological disaster that we caused or chemical or biological warfare or just a couple THOUSAND nuclear bombs?

  And it’s all the fault of the Religious Right. Whether it’s the American fundies or the Islamic Jihadists…. the RR is everywhere. All they do is run around trying to tell others how to live. They are so insecure in their own faith, any other belief is a challenge to them. I am 100% certain that if people didn’t doubt their own beliefs, that they wouldn’t feel a need to persecute others for theirs. It all boils down to “if other people believe something different than me, then maybe I might be wrong, but in order to assure myself that I am right, I can’t bear for those other people to exist; if I’m wrong, then at least everyone else will be wrong too.” They need therapy for their self-esteem issues, but that’s something they’ll never admit, let alone seek.

  And that’s why I worry.

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  • 12:25 pm
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