A twenty-two-year-old friend recently sent correspondence to Facebook acquaintances over the age of fifty asking "if anyone, in their lifetime, had ever seen the world so violently crazy like it's been in the past six to eight months." 

He wanted to know if times for people in this age group had ever been worse. He was wondering "if this era of mass shootings and senseless acts of terror was something new or if it has always been going on."

And he ended with "I'm sure things have never been perfect, but it sometimes feels like things keep getting worse and worse in the world..."

Two of three respondents said they thought that things had been even worse in the past, citing wars and assassinations and the Holocaust and the atomic bomb.  My usually optimistic husband, however, disagreed.  He did not have good news for our young friend.  Here is his response:

"No. This is worse. What's going on today has a distinctly ominous quality about it. If you were a futurist in the nineteen seventies who was laying out twenty possible scenarios for the future, all of which took overpopulation into account, then one of those scenarios would have been what we have today. But the other nineteen – although different – would have been just as dire."

He goes on to say, "I suspect that the situation that we have found ourselves in today is an unintended consequence of our inevitable bad habits, lifestyles and myopia.  Unfortunately, we are mere humans. If it hadn't been this consequence, it would have been some other compromised one. Any search for the guilty will end in the punishment of the innocent. But some number of us will survive. Our best bet is that the new Phoenix will bring more enlightenment than we did."

And he continues with, "Today, there is much less space and time to flee. Right away, you bump into another event. Just like in particle physics, the speed and the pressure increases while the number of options diminish. This inevitability was set in motion by us all years ago. There is no escape. We have passed the point of reversibility.  All we can do is wait it out."

In other words, we have reaped what we have sown.

Archaeologist, anthropologist and historian, Tobias Stone, posits in the online publication, Medium, that, in the grand scheme of things, “humans destroy themselves in fairly regular intervals" and that "We humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another."

Could these intervals of self-destruction be a stab at controlling the overpopulation that is making life on Planet Earth unlivable? Who knows?  It sure isn't helping any. I believe that we have gotten just brilliant enough to annihilate ourselves.

Think about it.  From the time we were in the Garden, humans have been both dominating and murderous toward one another.  At least, that was how the humans who created the Garden depicted them. 

For those who don't believe in the Garden, just take a look at human behavior over time.  Put two humans in a room for a few minutes and one of them is going to bonk the other one on the head and establish dominance.  It's a survival thing – controlling others through fear and trembling.  Whole religions and political systems are based on this concept.  And humans are largely ovine in nature (i.e., they have a herd mentality). They will follow a charismatic leader to the ends of the Earth.  And, no, I don't believe that the meek will inherit the Earth.  I believe that the cockroaches will inherit the Earth.  And maybe the initiators of the downfall.

And it's not just atomic bombs anymore, folks.  We've got a whole arsenal of new ways to destroy ourselves now. 

I fear that we may be only two or three generations away from total devastation.  Had I participated in our friend’s survey, I’m afraid I would have told him so (lucky for him, we’re not connected on Facebook!).  My husband, at least, was kind enough to wrap up his answer with "Fortunately, the new generation offers a ray of hope."

Yes, you've got to have hope - miles and miles and miles of hope.  Make sure you bring a suit of armor along with you when you go those miles.  And a tank.  Because, as our young friend observed, our world has gone "violently crazy."  You can't rely upon just getting blown away in a war zone anymore.  Now, all you've got to do is go to school, a movie, a mall, a concert, a sporting event, an airport, a prayer meeting. Your abrupt demise or dismemberment can occur anywhere, anytime.  Nobody cares about whether you're male or female, whether you're young or old, what your sexual orientation is or what color you are. Hatred paired with insanity is the great equalizer.

The cost of existence in today's world is living with the constant threat of random and increasingly horrific violence at the hands of those who prefer death to life. The nuts are running the nuthouse.

Because I feel this way, I think humans should get into the habit of committing random acts of kindness.  When people ask you for your presence, make yourself appear. Take care of each other.  Travel?  Sure!  Live your life fully and well.  Try not to commit too many sins of omission.  And, for God sake, don't put a fucking hate-and-fear-mongering fascist in the White House unless you want to see only one more generation instead of two or three. 

Am I being overly pessimistic?  I sure as hell hope so. 

So, had I responded to our friend’s survey, I would have told him this: In my lifetime, I remember ducking and covering during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember when JFK was shot.  I remember when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were shot.  I remember marching in moratoriums during the Vietnam War.  I remember Civil Rights marches. I remember genocides in Bosnia and Herzegovina  And there were always murders.  You just didn't have them thrown in your face by the media twenty-four hours a day.

I'll tell you one thing: I didn't worry about getting blown up at the grocery store by jihadists.  Actually, I don't really worry about that now because it hasn't hit close enough to home yet and worrying really doesn't accomplish anything. I don't think there's a way to put an end to terrorism – you knock one terrorist down, there are countless more behind him.  Or her.  Equal opportunity, right?

But I would also tell our friend to live his life fearlessly and resourcefully.  I would tell him to keep his wits about him and take responsibility.  I would tell him to figure out how to make the world a better place in his own unique way.  I would tell him to take nothing for granted.  And I would tell him to carry kindness in his heart instead of a big stick. 

In fact, I would tell him the same thing even if our world wasn’t violently crazy.