I learned something about myself yesterday – and about the eyes through which I now view the world and the events of my life. I believe it was sometime late last weekend that Carthage’s e-mail system completely crashed. . . and I mean it was the cyber equivalent of a car crashing into a telephone pole. And because of the utter failure of the school’s email software, everyone at Carthage is basically being strongly encouraged to shift their email over to a new provider. . . which I tried to do, except that the new provider wasn’t letting me in or even recognizing me as a Carthage employee. So I decided to jump over to my Yahoo email account – a completely separate thing – and email the computer help desk to let them know about my problem and get their help.
Except that when I went on to Yahoo, I found that their email system had also crashed completely . . . with prompts on the screen that I had never ever seen before that made it seem like an especially serious situation which might not be immediately rectified.
And within a couple of seconds, I was thinking to myself “We’ve been attacked.” There had just been something on the news the day before about how a Wall Street Journal reporter had uncovered government documents indicating that terrorist elements have been working diligently to infiltrate the computer system which sustains our power systems and that this will very likely be the target of their next attack . . . disabling large swaths of our nation’s power grid which would cause enormous disruption of our lives. And the instant that I realized that two of my three email systems were out of commission, I was thinking about the very real possibility that this was the result of some sort of terrorist cyber attack and seriously wondered how long it would be before the lights went out and my basement (window-less) Carthage studio was plunged into total darkness.
Well, as it turns out those two email crashes seemed to have nothing to do with each other and by later in the day both were pretty much back in business as though nothing had ever been wrong. . . and the lights stayed on, too.
But I am aware more than ever of how vulnerable I feel – and of how vulnerable in fact we all are, although we don’t like to think about it very much. This was really driven home to me this morning as I interviewed Neil Strauss, a former music reporter for the New York Times whose new book “Emergency” chronicles his efforts to prepare himself for whatever awful calamity might be around the corner. He began this journey of sorts in the wake of 9-11, Katrina, and various other emergencies and disasters which got him thinking about how helpless he would feel if something were to happen and the bottom fell out of everything. What if the power went out and the banks folded and the grocery stores were picked clean and the gas stations ran out of gas? How would he survive? How would he keep himself safe? Where would he get money? How would he find food? There are lots of people in the world who spend almost all of their time and resources actively preparing for such a scenario, and this guy got to know many of them and even tried enacting some of their strategies, just to see what it would feel like. Anyway, early in the book Strauss talks about how many people now tend to view the world through what he calls Apocalypse Eyes – basically the exact opposite of rose-colored glasses. It means living with an undercurrent of fear – of seeing potential threats in something as relatively innocuous as a problem with one’s email. What once might have only been a temporary inconvenience or a strange puzzlement now might seem to be the possible indication of something very ominous having occurred.
I have to say that I do not enjoy seeing the world through Apocalypse Eyes – and the last thing I want to become is a paranoid nut job who sees a burglar behind every door and a conspiracy behind every unfortunate turn of events. And for the most part, I manage to be an optimist who knows the world has problems but who sees potential for things to get better rather than worse. But every so often something will happen which reminds me that in some ways my Eyes are not what they used to be. . . and I wonder if those rose- colored glasses are gone forever.
pictured above: Kathy with our niece Lorelai in front of our laptop.