Where I live, if you were just walking around most times of the day, you would hardly ever have the feeling that anything was in jeopardy. It seems just about as peaceful as things can get. So much so, in fact, it’s a bit counter-intuitive to contemplate the notion that things are more precarious than they appear.
For one thing, in society at large, it is fairly well documented that people are riddled with all kinds of anxiety. And among these kinds of anxiety are not just the imagined fears that people can tend to have. In too many cases, they are literal and real for many people. And, we know it isn't just them. It is you and me, too. Mostly, this implies a reality that goes on behind the scenes, in hidden places. And, it seems, it is often in places where such realities cannot be contained as easily that you see it manifest itself.
People, in general, are a fearful bunch of creatures. This is not news. But, in our society, there is a strange relationship between everything that looks fine and well, and all that really isn’t.
Social media is a prime repository demonstrating this contrast. Fraught with fabrications, it also reflects many common realities. Books extensively articulate the simmering nature of the anxiousness of our generation. And, to be sure, this is not confined to just our generation. If we’re honest, there have been existential threats all along the way (look at all the TV shows we love to watch...about such things in other times). If anything is substantively different in our times, it may be the proliferation of information regarding our realities (and which invariably contribute to them).
As a group, we human-beings often try to build systems of protection that allay these types of concerns. Civically, this is most obvious in the forms of government we create (police, fire, regulations, voting protections, military, etc.). So, accentuating our vulnerability is the breakdown of trust in the ability of such institutions to protect us. On any given day, numerous headlines underscore these breakdowns, as they reveal the trust or the places or things that we have entrusted the protections we seek to. Now, as much as ever, we see significant (if not horrifying) gaps in the human leaders we have put in place to administrate them:
Why Foodborne Illness Is Surging
Trump Administration Begins Blitz to Find Elusive Voter Fraud Ahead of Midterms
In the protections we seek, there is a fine line, of course, between trusting and abdicating. And, it has become painfully obvious that the sweeping characterization that we have abdicated our trust to failing leadership is true.
The opportunity we are awkwardly (to put it mildly — many would say, existentially...) presented with is to identify both what it is that we need protection from and the institutions we have come to believe are necessary to do so.
Fear often operates at undetected levels. There are, of course, manifest exceptions — like the palpable things we probably fear. But, it’s the underlying things that we ruminate over that indicate that the problem is much more pervasive.
Remedies are complex, to be sure. But, in other ways, they are also alarmingly simple. For one thing, we just have to be more honest. The system of electing people to “take care of things“ for us has become far to convenient (abdication) and burned by the influence of money for us to continue the same approach.
Further, we need to get back involved in our shared, high endeavor of pursuing the common good. It is no longer sustainable (never really was either) to operate exclusively from a “what's good for me“ mentality.
We are tipping over at so many different levels. We have to re-engage, dispose of the buzzword-enemy-labeling strategies, and do the hard work of putting each of our shoulders to the wheel of actually working at making things good and addressing the things that compromise doing so
...to have real peace.
