Again? So Soon?

Here I am again, in the box at press level, watching Hurricane Rita cross the Gulf of Mexico. It's now a Category 4 storm, though it peaked as a Category 5 early this morning, with top winds of an astonishing 170 miles per hour.

So, the struggle resumes between fascination and dread - only now I'm watching myself as I watch the storm, trying to catch every swing of the pendulum. I'm also trying, in the interest of decency, to let dread win out.

Suspense

The other night I had a dream in which I made an important connection about apocalyptic thinking. I dreamed I was talking to people about all this when it occurred to me that the whole thing may be wrapped up in the lived experience of time.

Denial

Further reflections on Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans have helped me to draw together some of the threads that have run through this blog.

At least part of what it means to be a skeptic in public life is to steer a course between credulity and incredulity, and between the perverse relish for the apocalypse and simple denial. This is a difficult course to steer: the extremes exert a powerful influence on the human psyche (or, at least, on my psyche; I shouldn’t over generalize).

So, (for me, at least) to be a skeptic in public life is to maintain a tension among these influences, and to somehow find a way to live within and through this tension.

This is very hard to do.