Rainy Saturday

Ugh. Today was one of those days where it was yucky, rainy, dreary, cloudy, you-fill-in-the-rest outside. The sun doesn't often show its face around here after August 1, but days like today are on the really crummy end of the spectrum.

I was sitting at the nurses' station in between patients today, talking with one of the nurses I work with. We were talking about things like the tsunami, the horrific hurricanes, the flooding, the alleged bird flu that will wipe us all out, the man from Syracuse who tried to kidnap a girl outside the mall, terrorism in general................... I think you get the point. The nurse was saying, "You know, it's a wonder we aren't all on Paxil, the way the world is today!" And that's true! Paxil is an anti-anxiety drug, and we as a people have a lot to be anxious about. It seems like every time you watch the news (which I no longer do), you are hearing about something catastrophic happening [which the government could or should have prevented]. It's surprising that we don't walk around every day feeling like we did on September 12, 2001, the day we each identified a brand-new fear inside ourselves because of a different perspective about what could happen. Our world changed, and it's become a scarier place.

Do we really feel that way, though? Recently I found myself poo-pooing the folks who are in bird flu panic, saying, "You know what, they told us we were all going to die from last year's flu, too, and we're still here." I can't decide if that's a healthy perspective or if I am just a product of too much hype on television which has caused my desensitization about these things. There's definitely some truth to that; I remember watching the towers smoking away and feeling as if I were watching a movie. I honestly couldn't feel how scary the moment was - my eyes had seen pictures like that before and they weren't real, so how was my brain to know that this time it was?

It's like a grown-up version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Every time CNN has 24-hour coverage of an event which is expected to change history and it doesn't, I get a little bit more cynical about the next time a news channel tries to tell me I'm going to die soon. I don't think our minds and bodies were made to shift into panic gear every time the news reports something that could kill us, so we just stopped panicking. We got turned off to the fear, and we have become desensitized. It's as much a survival skill as it is a detriment to our compassion. Maybe we panicked the first and even the second and third time we were presented with information that our future was in jeopardy, but by the fourth and four hundredth time, we all said FORGET IT, I'm not listening anymore! Like the little kid who jams his fingers into his ears, screws his eyes up tight, and hums as loudly as he can, we refuse to let the scary thoughts in. And maybe that's why we're not all on Paxil.