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Brew City Magazine | |
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Guidelines About the Magazine Editor-in-Chief: Managing Editor: Associate Editor: |
Lisa Marie Kelleher
What happened to life? Is it just that I’ve gotten old, so all the horribleness of people is fully open to me? Or have things really gotten worse? Sometimes I don’t know. But they seem to be getting worse. The summers are hotter. The winters have less snow. The icecaps are melting. Dirty bombs have become a possibility. Suicide bombs have become a reality. The president is a bigger idiot than any other president has ever been. And, it seems to me, it’s not just the president. Everyone is stupider. Public education is a disaster. Autism is a huge worry for anyone now contemplating kids. Everyone is fat and getting fatter. Divorce rates are up. The world is so screwed up that Richard Pryor, a man who had MS and could not move in anyway that is considered normal, kept a gun by his bed, which he was incapable of using, just in case he was attacked. In an NPR interview in 1995, 10 years before he died, he said he was afraid of the Bogeyman. But his Bogeyman, the Bogeyman who now exists for all of us, isn’t a child’s fantasy of a monster under the bed. The Bogeyman is now the whole crazy world. Sometimes though, I wonder whether or not I am just ignorant. I don’t know what it was like to grow up in any other era than my own. I just reread The Basketball Diaries and Jim Carrol, writing about 1964-65, is petrified of nuclear weapons. In other eras, people were afraid of polio or the plague or simply being kicked in the head by a horse. And there is no doubt in my mind that parents have always been worried about their kids. But for how long have parents needed to worry whether their kids were going to be molested by their priests or their soccer coaches? Probably for millennia, at least when it comes to the priests. Is our urgent, daily fear a reality because we know too much? Now we know that the avian flu is coming. We know that terrorist cells exist within our borders. We can look up where each pedophile in our neighborhood lives online. This increased knowledge is doing nothing but freaking us all out. Granted, some people handle it better than others. Some choose to go through life, much to their benefit, simply believing that everything will be okay. But a lot of us don’t have that luxury. A lot of us are unable to break away from the constant stream of information that tells us our world is going to hell; so we are constantly on edge, constantly looking not only over our shoulders, but straight ahead of us, knowing that the Boogeyman is no longer just creeping behind us. He is living right next-door and waiting for the perfect time to cut us down.
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