Holy Nightmares! What’s Going On?

Artwork via YouTube.com

By Jill Chapin

September 9, 2014

Once upon a time, scary stories were made-up fairy tales, meant to excite children with trepidation but without the real expectation that any of it was true.

Now our scary stories are not only frighteningly real, they are the stuff meant to scare the wits out of normally rational adults. And the horrors seem to have been put on steroids this past year.

Witness the devolution of the Arab Spring. It would be hard to imagine anything worse than Syria’s stockpile of toxins that they used on their own people. Thanks to an unlikely coalition of Russia and the United States, they managed to remove and destroy them, but unfortunately our relief was short-lived, as other insanities replaced it. One is the emergence of IS (Islamic State), a group so terrifyingly violent that even al Qaeda is distancing itself from them. Reports of unspeakable acts of crucifixions and beheadings, resulting in the unimaginable fear of those running for their lives to avoid their horrific path of destruction, has caused many of us to simply stop reading and watching the news.

Then Russia – our former and now reconstituted adversary – just ups and invades Ukraine, leading to – what? Imagining all the possible scenarios, especially with Putin reminding us that Russia is a nuclear powerhouse, could just about put most of us wanting to cover our ears and hide under our beds.

Now added to the above apocalyptic reports are the latest stories that even science fiction writers would give pause before including all of these into one novel.

We have violent storms, flooding, earthquakes, wildfires and drought coursing through our country – all at the same time. And across the globe is an unchecked spread of the deadly Ebola virus that seems poised to rear its ugly head on our shores.

Already rearing its ugly head last week was a giant albino venomous cobra slithering through a Los Angeles neighborhood. It was later caught, but at what price to our collective rising blood pressures?

Crowding the snake story off the front pages is the latest rare respiratory virus spreading across the Midwest, sending hundreds of children to the hospital to be put on ventilators.

A potentially cataclysmic story just hit the news which further impacted our sense of having lost control over our lives. A meteorite just crashed in Nicaragua, creating a 39 foot crater. A mind-numbing scenario of a more substantial impact would have rendered all our other fears moot. And unbelievably, this came on the heels of the announcement that a meteor was blasting through space and would pass within a hair’s breadth of Earth.

All of the above are just what I can recall in the past fifteen minutes. I know everyone has numerous other anxieties that rock our collective boat, but this is all I can handle at the moment.

Throughout all of this, Robin Williams, an icon of mirth and laughter whose incomparable talents gave us respite from our worries for a while, left us when his humor would have been a soothing balm for our shaken souls.

I know that life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass; it’s about learning to dance in the rain. But it seems like we are drowning lately, and dancing is less on our minds than struggling to find a safe place to breathe easy.

Jill Chapin

Jill Chapin has been a guest writer and columnist in several Los Angeles area papers for over fifteen years. She has written a bilingual parenting book titled, "If You Have Kids, Then Be a Parent!" and a children's book entitled, "My Magic Bubble."

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