I have no time to develop this thought, but I was chewing on it a bit as I was shoveling the driveway this morning. It seems to me a lot of heated rhetoric takes the form of apocalyptic or revolutionary narratives. The listeners are asked to view themselves as special people in special times. I wonder if some of the effectiveness has to do with the trouble folks have in coming to grips with the vast scope of time and space. In the grand scheme of things, we are trivial. And this is daunting. (Alluded to by Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex). As Jon Stewart put it in his Rally for Sanity Speech, “We live in hard times, not end times.”
Wasn’t it Kurt Vonnegut that pointed out that we’re pretty special because, “unlike most mud, we get to stand up and look around for awhile?” Well, if he didn’t, then I’m saying it now.
How exactly would one know if we live in end times or not?
Like it or not, there is a lot of scary stuff going on. The deficit and debt are pretty much unprecedented in peacetime. We’ve never faced an economic competitor like China before (with an almost unending supply of cheap AND increasingly skilled labor). Not to mention the whole terrorist thing, and the two wars that it spawned, one of which isn’t exactly going that well.
Okay, perhaps it is not end times, but the times are unusual.