Most days when my alarm goes off, I jump out of bed and hit snooze just so I don’t have to think about whatever horrific world news Morning Edition is reporting. Then I lie there for 9 minutes and think about hell breaking loose in Pakistan, child soldiers in Congo, Dinner Jacket getting nukes and how suddenly we’ve decided to police the world with several hypocritical asterisks.
Funny, but this top of the morning panic is what is fueling my desire to become more knowledgeable about all things domestic. I think about how one day Jews in Europe were living their happy daily routines and the next they were marching barefoot through the snow into concentration camps. How Hutus and Tutsis went from being family, friends and neighbors to butchers, murderers and victims of genocide within a matter of weeks. Japanese communities all over the United States were rounded up and placed in “camps” right in my own state’s desert. One day they were flower and strawberry farmers, the next prisoners. Their passports were as ‘Merican as mine.
How planes flew into buildings and I haven’t slept the same since.
How a man was caught last week driving into the nation’s largest nuclear plant with a bomb in his truck, and oh — this plant is about 35 miles from my office, where I was sitting when I read the news. I wouldn’t haven’t seen the plume; I’d have been in it.
I don’t know how to escape this sort of everyday panic, other than feel like if I survived some sort of terrifying tragedy, I could take care of myself and hopefully have the strength to take care of others too. Granted, it might just be easier to turn the dial and wake up to classical music to avoid the news altogether. I just can’t do it. I just can’t be another patriotic sheep in the apathetic pasture.
It certainly doesn’t help my mood that it is 96 in Phoenix today. That’s right — 96. As in a good 20 degrees warmer than it should be in November. Tell me Mother Nature isn’t giving us all the finger for having this administration in the White House for eight years? We are being punished and Mama Earth is, not surprisingly, a liberal.
In case your invitation got lost in the mail, Mr. Fall and Ms. Autumn, you are cordially invited to attend this season. Hurry up already. We’re sweating big, panicky bullets over here.
~K