(Opinion) Of late, I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It’s more a general anxious feeling that something momentous is about to happen and we don’t know what or when.
And I’m not the only one with this feeling. Lots of my Brazilian friends have the same angst.
Where they never did this before, of late, they have taken to looking over their shoulders to see what, or if, something is coming up behind them.
Is the stunning weather of the past six months sending us some message?
Is the extreme heat in many parts of the world, day after day, the hottest days, weeks, and months on record, a precursor of nature’s payback for our years of callous treatment of the environment?
According to the NY Times: “In July, widespread marine heat waves drove temperatures back up to near-record highs, with some hot spots nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly 38 Celsius”.
Lazing in a hot bath may be perfect for a cold winter’s night, but it sure doesn’t feel great when diving in for a cooling swim on a “hotter than ever” summer day.
What this global heat will do to the ocean’s fragile marine ecosystem is something we’ll have to wait and see.
And what will hurricanes, tornados, floods, forest fires, parched and dry riverbeds, melting glaciers and early summer mountain snowstorms all alert us to something; but what?
Despite the modeling and study by legions of experts, we feel that we don’t really know what will come next.
We’ll just have to wait and see. It’s the waiting that fuels our unease.
As a wise Brazilian friend says, “This feeling of overwhelming change is casting its shadow upon every thinking human being.”
Is what we label ‘the new normal’ just our way of finding verbiage to describe the current changes while we wait for the other shoe to drop, more change, and another ‘new normal’?
Most of us had succumbed to flu, but that didn’t ready us for Covid, two years of total or partial lockdown, and the need to learn to live and work in a restricted space, alone or in a small group.
Will the vaccines work for the new Covid versions? Will the viruses mutate in a wild competition with the drugs to control them? We will have to wait and see.
Deforestation in the Amazon is heading toward a tipping point. If reached, the rainforest will become a savanna.
Then the released gobs of greenhouse gas that its biomass stores will profoundly affect global warming, and the enormous contribution it makes to the world’s oxygen supply will end with catastrophic results we can only imagine.
Nine countries have nuclear weapons; some have irrational leaders like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un with fingers on nuclear triggers.
Putin has more than once threatened to use them against the Ukrainian military.
Will Russia or another of these nine make the wrong move in this international power game and will we awake one day to find that the world as we have known it, is gone forever?
Sitting on a trial jury was a sometimes boring, sometimes interesting, even sometimes exciting chore and responsibility of citizenship and civic duty.
Fueled by social media, recent credible threats against grand jurors who voted for convictions in high profile cases have made jury service in the U.S. a sometime dangerous duty.
It used to be that we could happily and safely go to the mall on the weekend for shopping and socializing, buying Ice cream cones for the kids, maybe take in a film.
That was before a gang of fifty looters wearing black hoodies and armed with bear spray ransacked a Los Angeles Nordstrom store at 4 PM for US$100,000 of luxury goods and attacked a helpless security guard.
If that was a unique ‘Clockwork Orange’ event, it might be overlooked, an outlier in an otherwise peaceful place.
But thanks to a TikTok video which, according to UK’s Sky, “appeared to promote an organized robbery of an Oxford Street London store, with a date, time and even a dress code” this kind of attack will spread.
It’s hard to feel safe and comfortable anywhere, anymore.
It all adds up to partially explain what could best be called the age of anxiety, a name given to the twentieth century which has spilled over into the 21st.
We can’t know when the other shoe will drop, and it is our burden that we can’t escape the feeling of anxiety while we wait for it.
Our anxious mood is captured beautifully by the poet WH Auden:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play . . .
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Perhaps it would be better if we really didn’t give a damn about whether or when the other shoe will drop.
But we do.
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