We wake up in the mornings and we go to work or we go to our office if we work from home. We get the children ready for school and send them off. Kiss our husbands. Kiss our wives. We complain about our jobs or the traffic on the way. We go to the grocery store or we log into our social media accounts. We go about our day and we don’t pay attention nor are we prepared for the time when our days are interrupted. We dream like those in movies where disaster pierces the peace of those who never expected things to be different. Open your eyes and look around. Things are different. But we do not pay attention nor are we prepared. For those who do prepare, like the old man down the street with a basement filled with extra food and water, he is crazy. Even though we don’t really know what crazy is. He’s just it. A conspiracy theorist fool. He is mocked by those who go into the grocery stores never contemplating the moment when the land may no longer produce the potatoes they so casually lift into their carts. Never expecting that one day the land won’t produce and the trucks will no longer be capable of being driven to the store to put on the shelf the Idaho potatoes we never considered won’t be there one day.
We just go about our day, writing our books, taking our pictures, building our businesses and shopping at grocery stores we’ve claimed as our own. It will always be there when we need it, we say. Our desensitization to evil has gone unnoticed. Death itself is a past time no longer cloaked under the veil of mystery but walking around openly, shaking hands and taking bets. The constant fuel of white and black relations is just the same ole, same ole song we’ve been singing since the 1960s until we look up and a race war has begun (and I don’t trust the economy can take it. The old man is wise). Who knows what may come upon this Earth or if it will be our airport next time or our minds tampered with. Who knows where the next Manchurian Candidate will come from or who will hear the voices next, but I’m talking outside the box now, I shouldn’t do that. Isn’t that right?
Just as long as we can update our Facebook pages and RT our favorite Twitterbugs, maybe post a cool picture of yesterday’s meal on Instagram, all is well. Keep walking on the wheel. Hampsters spinning. People moving in the same place. Too busy living to live. Too busy to see the world ain’t safe no more. Louisiana dropped to freezing temperatures this weekend only to go back up to the seventies this week but that doesn’t mean anything. Half the continent is in the winter months. How fitting, for the love of the world has gone cold. A change has come and no one is paying attention.
We’ve all heard this before. But keep in mind that this is NOT an imperative so much as a warning. There is a time and a place for telling, and in fact, situations in which it is preferable or even necessary to tell the events rather than show them. Not every piece of information in your story needs the same level of attention and importance. But which is which, and how do you know?
The PBS Blog 