On my commute this morning -- a quiet hour of forced contemplation, accompanied by the BBC World News -- it occurred to me that in the news business, and in life in general, we tend to miss something: the fact that we pay attention mainly to the unusual.
As I drive down the interstate, a place often affected with accidents and minor catastrophes, my commute is generally uneventful. I am surrounded by cars and trucks, and their drives are likewise normal, even dull. Every day, millions upon millions commute to work, noticing the drive mainly because they find it boring. Whereas, if you give it a moment's thought, the whole thing could go sideways astoundingly quickly.
By extension, thousands of flights take off and land without trouble every day and night, even in parts of the world where (if we're honest with ourselves) it's astounding that they have a civil air system at all. Trains travel down miles and miles of rail, never bouncing off those narrow strips of steel, and crude and refined oil is pumped in volumes one has difficulty grasping in a simple way through as many miles of giant pipelines. Nuclear reactors pen up the most basic level of explosion -- splitting the very atoms of uranium -- without mishap in dozens of places around the world. Ships don't sink, cargoes are unloaded, and people run through their routines, blissfully unaware.
This is a miracle. It's miraculous that things just tick along without disaster, day after day after day, when we really are constantly perched on the brink of the precipice at every moment.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all its contents ... some day the piecing
together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of
reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go
mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and
safety of a new Dark Age.”
- H.P. Lovecraft
No comments:
Post a Comment