Thursday, December 30, 2004

New Year Disillusion

What with 2005 right around the corner, we're still reeling from the sheer number of lives snatched from this very Earth four days ago, so I'm not sure there is much to reason to party away this weekend.

I suppose we could celebrate that the world has come through sort of intact, if you consider a heightened sense of fear something to be pleased about. We've spent the whole year looking over our shoulder for the next terrorist attack, incendiary or biological, and now we can quite happily stroll down the street ready to dart into the nearest door way ahead of the next raging wall of water or earthquake that comes along. We're still waiting for Vesuvius to erupt and now the Mediterranean is at risk of tsunamis as well. I think the paranoia is building so quickly that we should all live in bubbles, indestructible, titanium-reinforced plastic bubbles.

I'm actually not completely ungrateful for the world in which we live. I mean my family and friends have come through the year healthy and well and I'm very thankful for that. I still have all the limbs I started out with, all my fingers and toes, and my psyche's more or less intact.

Actually, I'm not sure there's much direction in this post, it's just that I'm still really mad that there wasn't any kind of warning system, not even a few tin cans and some string.

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