These days, everyone I talk to sounds anxious and miserable. My first reaction is sympathy and empathy, the way my mother taught me. My second reaction is relief, since misery loves company. And when I feel a bit of guilt for that, I say to myself, “How can we not be?” Every time I turn on the news, there’s another calamity. It feels as if our world is imploding, and none of us will escape unscathed.
First there’s a sense of world disintegration with the mess in Afghanistan. Seeing thousands of people trying to cram into the airport to leave: scary. Watching people clinging to planes to get out: horrifying. Hearing the fears of women for the future: words escape me.
And how about our ailing planet and the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel’s report that climate change is intensifying and accelerating? This former island girl broke out into a sweat over the first rainfall ever at Greenland’s ice sheet, shedding water and raising sea levels. According to the report, these changes to our oceans are already “irreversible for centuries to millennia.”
Our mood doesn’t improve watching the mammoth destruction of Haiti’s earthquake and hearing reports of almost 2,000 deaths. There’s a growing nervousness about our physical world. If you follow the wild fires in California that make the state look like a smoky Hell, you know what I mean. That’s especially true when you saw the smoke drift into Tennessee and hover over Signal Mountain.
We sometimes get relief by turning off the news, but the anxiety is embedded deep within, especially over COVID and its delta variant. Maybe that’s why people are driving like nerve-wracked nut jobs. They speed, swerve and cut you off; impatience, annoyance and anger are the new normal for some drivers. And forget the yield signs. Some people just don’t see the signs. Their minds are elsewhere.