These days we have more reasons than we’d really like to think the worst of the world.
The news pulls into our lives every morning like a train, filled with discouraging baggage, like the daily Baghdad body count, the evil expostulations of leading malefactors, and, to add dismay to our discouragement, we regularly hear our own leaders speak of trying to locate and kill this or that terrorist, even relatively jocular Bill Clinton saying, in regard to his own intentions toward Osama Bin Laden, that he would have “taken him out.” Who are we hearing here, Mafioso Bill?
Encompassed as we are by such darkness, are we to despair entirely of the longed-for concept of a civilized world? Not really.
What we often forget is that we really are at war, a different kind of war, to be sure, that is sort of the steadily simmering pot of evil-begets-evil, instead of the pot boiling over with such outright ingredients of war as infantries shooting and bayoneting each other en masse.
But we are, nevertheless, at war. And during such an unfortunate episode, there always are such regrettable items as the daily body count and leaders, even the most distinguished, plotting, as they must, the death of the enemy.
Yet somehow civilization, bruised and brutalized as it has all too frequently been by wars of one kind or another, goes on and emerges after the horror and heroism into a new, if brief, time of peace and reassurance.
So let’s not let all the brutal news brutalize us so much we forget about all the other civilized people who need us to keep our faith in civilization.
Tom Attea, humorist and creator of NewsLaugh.com, has had six shows produced Off-Broadway. Critics have called his writing "delightfully funny," "witty," with "good, genuine laughs" and "great humor and ebullience." |
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