Once again, the center isn't holding.
With the Mideast still spiraling in chaos, a wacko gets mad at bosses in Moore, Okla., and imitates the news by beheading a coworker -- and trying to behead another. Meanwhile, in the nation's Capitol, our U.S. Secret Service looks at best like the Three Stooges and at worst like a co-conspirator as it lets a man with a knife jump the White House fence, run in an open door through a muted alarm and get near the stairway to the president's living quarters before an off-duty Secret Service agent tackles him.
Another man with Ebola flies into Dallas and walks around sick for four days after Dallas hospital workers failed to act when he told them he was recently in West Africa where an Ebola epidemic is raging. Meanwhile 1,500 soldiers from Forth Campbell on the Tennessee and Kentucky border are being deployed to Liberia to help contain the outbreak there. U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander calls the epidemic in Africa "potentially as dangerous to the United States as the Islamic State in the Middle East. As we've been reminded today [Wednesday], American cities are only one plane flight away from these infected countries." And he notes, correctly, that an out-of-control epidemic in Africa could devastate entire countries, potentially creating new safe havens for terrorists.
In the same week and near the top of the world, an estimated 35,000 Pacific walrus looking for places to rest in the absence of sea ice have come ashore on a beach in northwest Alaska, according to photographs and scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"It's another remarkable sign of the dramatic environmental conditions changing as the result of sea ice loss," said Margaret Williams, managing director for the World Wildlife Fund's Arctic program. "The walruses are telling us what the polar bears have told us and what many indigenous people have told us in the high Arctic, and that is that the Arctic environment is changing extremely rapidly and it is time for the rest of the world to take notice and also to take action to address the root causes of climate change."
And here in Chattanooga, young black men shoot each other for no real reason and no one will tell police who the shooters are -- partly out of fear, but partly because of some misguided code of conduct adopted because the urban core community is sunk in poverty, ignorance and distrust.
There is bias, too. Just last week, a young gay man from Highland Park was beaten severely and his jaw shattered. He was beaten in front of a small crowd, and as they struck him they shouted gay slurs, he said. Three 18-year-olds have been charged with aggravated assault in what police have called a hate crime.
Decades ago, famed author, journalist and essayist Joan Didion described the troubled insanities, of our modern world by borrowing from William Butler Yeats 1919 poem titled, "The Second Coming."
The optimum phrase from both Yeats and Didion in her work "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" was, "Things Fall Apart. The centre cannot hold."
And it's true today, as it was in the aftermath of the first World War when Yeats was writing and as it was in the 1960s when Didion wrote of misplaced children in a frightening and fragmented society where culture and morality were moldering.
But it's also true that in those times and now, there was and is cause for optimism. And great opportunity. We simply have to have the will to be positive. We have to be just as stubbornly upbeat as we are blindingly cynical.
In the Mideast, all is not focused on war. The "new" Suez Canal, a proposed $9 billion, 45-mile addition to the existing canal, would eliminate a one-way bottleneck and increase daily traffic from 25 ships per day to over 90. This is not an economic opportunity and game-changer that a warring region could accomplish, right? But this week something amazing happened. The Egyptian people crowdfunded a new Suez canal that the government had planned to fund through a variety of methods. Instead, Egyptians -- in eight days -- purchased in their local banks more than enough certificates to fund the entire project.
If there is hope there, we can have it, too.
Ebola is no different. Despite all of the medical evidence that Americans don't need to be worried about Ebola here at home, many people aren't listening. A recent Harvard research poll found that about 40 percent of Americans believe there will be a widespread Ebola outbreak on U.S. soil within the next year, and a quarter of them are worried someone in their immediate family will catch the virus. The researchers who did that polling concluded that the media needs to do a better job of emphasizing exactly how Ebola spreads. Tennessee senators are helping by praising both U.S. medicine and Fort Campbell soldiers who will be on the ground in Africa to support containment efforts.
We can slow climate change, too. Congress may be gridlocked, but cities, companies and citizens aren't. Chicago, Cincinnati and Cleveland are negotiating with power companies to buy up to 100 percent renewable energy credits for their residents and small businesses. Companies like Volkswagen in Chattanooga have invested in both energy conservation and solar farms -- not just to be green, but also to save money. And homeowners are finding that solar panel prices have dropped 80 percent since 2008 while the cost of coal and nuclear energy -- along with our electric bills -- have gone up.
Honestly, the cultural problems of poverty, diversity and inner-city hopelessness may be the toughest problems we face: They are ones for which we have no ready engineering or medical or technological solutions.
They are the ones requiring the most imagination and elbow grease. And they are ones, in the key places, where we have to make the center hold.