Something just occurred to me that might explain what's wrong with so many people -- and I'm not saying this to make fun of them or call them names, either. I think it's true
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I agree with you, and I think that's a perfectly reasonable theory.
I have chronic anxiety, and I have to manage my medication very carefully. I have to limit the amount of news I take in, and I have to treat myself with kid gloves at all times. Anything less is always disastrous.
If religion is the opiate of the masses, then I guess I'm a "Jewish Junkie", LOL Studying Torah has really been a lifesaver for me, I only wish I'd started sooner in life.
I've got PTSD myself, and it has kept me from having any sort of real, beneficial social life and anything else worth a damn in life. From what I know of the condition, and what I've seen of people around me, it looks as if one hell of a lot of other people have their own version of it. Some drink, others take drugs, others are addicted to sex, others have other means of escaping from what someone I once knew called "the snakes in the brain." One such dodge is addiction to power -- and you can bet a lot of politicians and despots have it. It excuses nothing, but it sure as hell can explain a lot. Even those doing the diagnosing of it are in the throes of it. Some have it more intensely than others; some don't seem to be affected much by it, but you never know. Each has his or her own version of it, so that its manifest expressions can take countless forms. But it's ruining us all. Which is why we need to open that final/ultimate/infinite frontier of space: Earth has become a killing-bottle, and much more of this and it will
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I tend to distrust artistic trends born after 1914 pretty much for the reasons you brought up. Dadaism in particular is the direct result of how the horrors of World War I warped a generation, and I thought the description of last year's Colbert/Stewart rally on Washington as a 'Dadaist movement' was an apt one
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You should have moved out to suburbia, you know. I was only six when the Wall fell, but I still don't ever recall fearing full-scale nuclear war one bit. It must have really helped to live well out of any likely blast or fallout radius, because there was never a day I felt like I wouldn't be OK.
I have lived in suburbia all my life, well away from the central cities of which the suburbs I lived in were satellites. But from about age 9 on I was well aware of exactly what sort of damage a hydrogen bomb could wreak, and how far its radius of total destruction spread. I also knew about the fact that numerous hydrogen bombs would be dropped on various great American cities, so that the total megatons of those bombs would come to anywhere from 25 to 100, and be spread out just enough to ensure that everything would be totaled within a radius of at least 100 miles. I also knew about just how much fallout World War III would generate -- enough to poison the entire planet and wipe out most higher forms of life (the exceptions being such
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I'll think about this, the PTSD theory, certainly there is something to what you say.
Life is better than ever in some ways, but also more lonely and yes, the terror is global and huge in its implications.
I am a hopeful type of person, that is my disposition but I agree - we need to shape up. The stars may hold out some hope in the long run, if we can get there soon enough.
Like you, I was brought up with the worry of a nuclear holocaust. Who thought we would be fighting ISLAM now? In this day and age, but of course, one of the issues is that Communism has only morphed not died, and the small "c" communists of today, tend to make excuses for radical Islam and are helping them do their evil.
There's also a positive feedback loop involved, in that people under chronic stress tend to have more and more babies, an ancient, instinctive reaction of living creatures to try to ensure the continuation of their genes no matter what happens to them. This is just as true of people as any other creature; and in the last 100 years, which have been full of chronic stress for everyone, the global human population has increased by a factor of 10. But more people means more crowding and fewer resources to go around for everyone, and that means more wars over territory and resources, more terrorism, more stress of every kind. Worse, our medical and other scientific advances mean that per capita, more babies and mothers survive childbirth, more children live to at least age 10 or so, more people live long enough to reproduce, and more elderly people live long lives during which they consume resources and take up space like everyone else, and that means that the rate of population increase -- its acceleration -- itself is going up, as
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I have chronic anxiety, and I have to manage my medication very carefully. I have to limit the amount of news I take in, and I have to treat myself with kid gloves at all times. Anything less is always disastrous.
If religion is the opiate of the masses, then I guess I'm a "Jewish Junkie", LOL Studying Torah has really been a lifesaver for me, I only wish I'd started sooner in life.
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I have lived in suburbia all my life, well away from the central cities of which the suburbs I lived in were satellites. But from about age 9 on I was well aware of exactly what sort of damage a hydrogen bomb could wreak, and how far its radius of total destruction spread. I also knew about the fact that numerous hydrogen bombs would be dropped on various great American cities, so that the total megatons of those bombs would come to anywhere from 25 to 100, and be spread out just enough to ensure that everything would be totaled within a radius of at least 100 miles. I also knew about just how much fallout World War III would generate -- enough to poison the entire planet and wipe out most higher forms of life (the exceptions being such ( ... )
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Life is better than ever in some ways, but also more lonely and yes, the terror is global and huge in its implications.
I am a hopeful type of person, that is my disposition but I agree - we need to shape up. The stars may hold out some hope in the long run, if we can get there soon enough.
Like you, I was brought up with the worry of a nuclear holocaust. Who thought we would be fighting ISLAM now? In this day and age, but of course, one of the issues is that Communism has only morphed not died, and the small "c" communists of today, tend to make excuses for radical Islam and are helping them do their evil.
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