We seem to be a flawed people. Call it Original Sin, genetic disposition, poor herd instincts—whatever—but we have a darker side that from time to time just flashes at us, from time to time explodes. We see the worst of it in examples like Nazi Germany, in Rwanda, in Kosovo. We see the little flashes in our herd reaction to things like the current H1N1 “crisis”, when thousands of people seem on the verge of losing their grip. You start to see that, while many people do behave rationally, as a herd there seems to be a fine line separating us from lynch mobs and swarmings.

Part of the trouble is that we like it. No doubt, our great successes are too few; the causes for celebrations are too few. We get a glimpse of what we could be with the pleasure and excitement of the Torch Relay crowds, but even that we smear with allegations (or probabilities?) of political interference and manipulation. The dark side seems always there.

If our loves go well, we seem content to keep it to ourselves. If things go wrong, we want to sing it, wail it, publish it. It’s not just confined to country music that most songs are of love lost, though that field does go to excess (“What do you get when you play a country record backwards? You get your woman back, your dog back, and your truck back!).

I have no doubt that great and wonderful things happen to people around the country, but we all know that most of this will not make the news. It isn’t news. For the most part, our news reports are The Troubles of the Day. It’s not just what a warped news station wants to feed us, it’s what we want to hear. I’ve been accused of leaning to the negative (and not offering solutions) in my articles, and no doubt the facts would support it. I’m a proof of my own thesis.

Lately, as vastly improved communication has shrunk the world, we have fallen in love with the Really BIG Crisis. Something we would be helpless against, something we can’t escape, something ultimate and unforgiving, the very pinnacle of trouble that will be there to disturb our sleep no matter how we try to rationalize it. And hey– since it’s so good, we write about it, we film it, we fill the newscasts with any faint indication of it. For a people starved for emotional abuse, it’s just the thing.

Pandemic has always been a goody, and lately we get a glimpse of the undercurrents of that, should we actually be faced with a disease that was truly dangerous.

A decade ago it was an asteroid crashing into the earth, a notion fueled by several books on the topic and then the Armageddon movie and several copies. Oh, it was going to happen. We were assured of that by a thousand geeky experts paraded across the news broadcasts. Their only surprise was that it hadn’t happened already. Somewhere, out in the black of space, an asteroid was relentlessly making its way here, our name on it. I considered beefing up my roof rafters, but abandoned the idea.

The background noise has been Global Warming. The ice will melt. The seas will rise. The weather will go wacky. It could be true. On the other hand, some respected scientists suggest that it’s the start of a cycle of warmer weather that we have had before, centuries ago. I did measure my house against the nearby shore, and I’ve got about eighteen feet to spare, though the cataclysmic storms might push waves a bit higher. However, since I won’t likely be around when that happens, I’m not going to start building dikes.

When the asteroid idea was waning, we had the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Certainly a tragic event for the nations struck. Suddenly “tsunami” was a word on every tongue, and we reveled in how we could pronounce it without the “t”, like leaving the “p” out of “ptarmigan”. That’s adaptability for you. Accomplishment. Who said it was all bad?

I digress. The minor earthquake a few days ago off British Columbia brought the immediate question of “Was there a tsunami?” “Would a Tsunami hit California?” (Being the centre of western culture, that question had to be asked on the news.) No there wasn’t. In fact, did you ever ask yourself why, until 2004, most people had never heard much about Tsunami’s? Funny. We’ve had our share of major earthquakes, in fact we’re told that minor ones happen by the thousands every day of the week, but suddenly even in Nova Scotia we’re being warned that (any day now) a tsunami could come rolling in from the Atlantic and bury us all in a catastrophic, rolling wall of water, boats, and vaccination clinics. Could it be that they are actually rare? Is that why your grandfather, your great-grandfather, your second cousin’s uncle’s best friend Billy never even heard of “tsunami”– and certainly couldn’t spell it?

The mild shock in the Queen Charlotte Islands area brought the experts onto TV again this week for the earthquake theme. Certainly The Big One was coming on the West Coast (and some of them threw in East Coast as well… have to keep us all on our toes… only Manitoba seems safe)— the plates were slipping. Slowly, inexorably slipping, and one of these days, guaranteed in the next hundred years (you could almost heard the seismologists smacking their lips) they would make the big jump and—whooo baby, there goes the Olympic Village and the Seattle Space Needle!

I guess it’s our nature. Maybe it’s a collective guilt for our growing interest in high definition television, and we seek appropriate punishment. I don’t know, but we love it. Sure, half the world goes to bed hungry every night, but I bet they aren’t lying there worrying about the ice caps melting, the new chandelier in the hall ripping loose from the ceiling, or a humungous rock the size of the moon streaking in from Andromeda just when our house (with relatively decent shingles) is– drat the luck!– just on the wrong side of the earth at the wrong time.

It’s the burden we bear. But seem to enjoy.

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