There is a book by Stephen Flynn called "The Edge of Disaster," He says therein that "Nearly 90 percent of Americans are currently living in locations that place them at moderate to high risks of earthquakes, volcanoes, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, or high-wind damage." He may exaggerate a bit, but it still makes a valid point. The Earth is a dangerous place!
Given what a dangerous world this is, it's remarkable human beings have survived at all, let along prospered. It is a tribute to our amazing intelligence and adaptability that we survive in the jungle and deserts, in the arctic and the tropics, We survive in the mountains and the lowlands. Humans are truly amazing. We may be surviving on Mars soon if we get off our duffs and go for it.
Since the invention of photography and then television, however, we have become more inclined to whine about the difficulties inherent in living on Earth, it seems, rather than carry on the pioneer spirit. I suspect this tendency to whine about how tough life is got a big boost when Dorothea Lange took her famous photographs of the Depression and Dust Bowl folks. They did look pitiful.
It was fed even more by television's inclination to focus on all the disasters which befall us. The relentlessly bad news from Vietnam certainly contributed greatly to our national decision to cut and run there. The TV coverage of the Katrina disaster, much of it completely erroneous and based on spreading rumors rather than actual reporting, magnified our perception of the extent of an extensive disaster, making it seem much worse and helping hide the real culprits from scrutiny. That the New Orleans government had CHOSEN to take millions and millions of dollars and waste it on Mardi Gras parades and other fun things and on vote-buying projects rather than use it to fix the levees was mostly ignored. That the neighboring state of Missouri, also sustaining massive damage, got busy and fixed their damage promptly was mostly ignored. The TV reporting continually focused on the people of New Orleans who sat passively, whined, looted, robbed, murdered, and transplanted their passivity, whining, and crime to Houston, Texas, and other towns which had opened their doors to try to help.
And now, after relentlessly pounding bad news, relentlessly ignoring the good news coming out of Iraq, the media now simply chooses to IGNORE all the news out of Iraq. It’s as if it no longer exists since things are going well there. Dozens of front-page stories of the success in Iraq are simply not printed. The occasional piece, probably to promote a fiction of objectivity, will admit that the surge is working, but it’s treated as unimportant, not really worth mentioning.
Now that television has helped create a whining, ignorant electorate, they toss out various candidates as Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul trot out American Idol candidates, and we’re supposed to pick them based on how well they dance, how pretty they are, or how charmingly they speak. They promise us anything, but deliver platitudes only. Change. Jobs. Health care. And they promise they’ll get somebody else to pay for it all. If this sort of thing sells, we’re doomed.
And it may be selling to young voters, ignorant but rebellious, anti-establishment by nature, who appear ready to vote for anyone promising nebulous "change."
Stephen Flynn may well be right. We are living on “The Edge of Disaster,” but not from hurricanes or tornadoes or floods. It is the edge of political disaster. After we've learned to cope with deserts and mountains and oceans and the Arctic coastline, it would be a shame for civilization to be destroyed by politics.
