For My Mother: In Praise of a Life Lived
Chasing an Elusive God
Why Christianity Is Dying But Spirituality Is Thriving?
On the Frontlines
Ray Liotta, Seth Green Join an All-Star Cast in Indie Film ‘The Identical’
A Life of Hope
Habits for a Heart Healthy Lifestyle
Emotional Equations
Are You a Compulsive or Binge Eater?
Faith, Freedom and Rocker John Schlitt
Robert Griffin III: Not the Average Rookie
Green Powders to Add to Your Diet Now
Natural Deodorants That Actually Work
Birth of a Habit
Madly In Love With ME
Is It Love If You're All Cranky When You Give It?
Living A Meaningful Life
"The Bible" a Labor of Love for Famed Producer, Wife
Who Should Be Allowed to Pray for President Obama?
I can imagine a time when half the population of Europe is wiped out by an
epidemic. I can imagine a time when marauding armies wipe out whole
civilizations in South and Central America. I can imagine a time when half the
children in this country die of infectious diseases before they can reach the
age of 14. I can imagine a time when war is so prevalent that 40,000,000 people
get killed in six years, and other people have blackout shades on their windows
and all conversation stops every time a plane is heard overhead, because it
could always be an enemy bomber. I can imagine a time when this country is torn
by deadly riots and massive slaughter in a civil war. I can imagine bloody
revolutions, with governments collapsing like dominoes and heads of state being
hanged, shot and beheaded.
I can imagine a time when the whole global economy completely collapses, there are hardly any jobs to be had, people starve and even the money moguls give up in despair and jump to their deaths from the towers of high finance. I can imagine a time when drought is so severe that part of America is dubbed the "dust bowl." I can imagine winters so cold that you can you can drive across Long Island Sound on the ice, that farmers in the upper Midwest have ropes strung up between their houses and their barns so they won't get disoriented in the white-out blizzards and freeze to death, and I can imagine summers so hot that the young, the old and the sick drop like flies.
Actually it's easy to imagine all this, because it's all history. Yet here we are, snug as a bug in a rug. Now how can that be? And if the people who lived through all of that had crawled into bunkers and said, "Let's not bother to plan for the future because obviously the End is at hand," what sort of world would we be living in today?
I can imagine a time when the whole global economy completely collapses, there are hardly any jobs to be had, people starve and even the money moguls give up in despair and jump to their deaths from the towers of high finance. I can imagine a time when drought is so severe that part of America is dubbed the "dust bowl." I can imagine winters so cold that you can you can drive across Long Island Sound on the ice, that farmers in the upper Midwest have ropes strung up between their houses and their barns so they won't get disoriented in the white-out blizzards and freeze to death, and I can imagine summers so hot that the young, the old and the sick drop like flies.
Actually it's easy to imagine all this, because it's all history. Yet here we are, snug as a bug in a rug. Now how can that be? And if the people who lived through all of that had crawled into bunkers and said, "Let's not bother to plan for the future because obviously the End is at hand," what sort of world would we be living in today?
Actually, the biggest changes I've seen in my lifetime are the overall
increase in population and the speed and accuracy with which news arrives on our
doorsteps, thanks entirely to electronic communications. News that once took
days, weeks or even months to either travel by print or word of mouth (or just
as likely fizzle out in transit) now circles the globe in seconds. Radio changed
that, of course, but without the visual impact of film, it all seemed further
away and much, much less of an immediate threat. And as they say in the media
biz, if it bleeds it leads, which means that the media make their living by
pandering to our insatiable appetite for the sensational, the horrendous, the
ugly and the bizarre.
So the world we see today, compared with the one I grew up in, is the world as seen through the lenses of cameras and camcorders and instantaneously transmitted by cable & satellites that didn't exist fifty years ago-- images from the other side of the world that hit us right in the face. But also about fifty years ago a man named Marshall McLuhan was the first to coin the term "global village" when he foresaw the vast changes in self and world perception that electronic communications would bring on, and so here we are.
It's not that bad things are happening with a severity or at a rate greater than they did in the past, but merely that our awareness of them has been both magnified and sped up, And yes, that is mind boggling because we really haven't yet caught up with it by realizing that it's all quite normal and has always been that way, and consequently we haven't adjusted our expectations so we can take it more in stride. Just to put this in perspective, my grandmother saw the world going soft and straight to hell in a handbasket when the car makers came out with automatic transmission in the 1940s.
I see the revival of fundamentalist religions worldwide as a way of coping with the deep anxieties all this rapid change creates. But this too will pass, because children being born now will have never known what it's like to wait for tomorrow morning's newspapers to find out what happened today. As McLuhan had it, the medium, is the message here.
So the world we see today, compared with the one I grew up in, is the world as seen through the lenses of cameras and camcorders and instantaneously transmitted by cable & satellites that didn't exist fifty years ago-- images from the other side of the world that hit us right in the face. But also about fifty years ago a man named Marshall McLuhan was the first to coin the term "global village" when he foresaw the vast changes in self and world perception that electronic communications would bring on, and so here we are.
It's not that bad things are happening with a severity or at a rate greater than they did in the past, but merely that our awareness of them has been both magnified and sped up, And yes, that is mind boggling because we really haven't yet caught up with it by realizing that it's all quite normal and has always been that way, and consequently we haven't adjusted our expectations so we can take it more in stride. Just to put this in perspective, my grandmother saw the world going soft and straight to hell in a handbasket when the car makers came out with automatic transmission in the 1940s.
I see the revival of fundamentalist religions worldwide as a way of coping with the deep anxieties all this rapid change creates. But this too will pass, because children being born now will have never known what it's like to wait for tomorrow morning's newspapers to find out what happened today. As McLuhan had it, the medium, is the message here.
