Today we celebrate Halloween, that holiday dedicated to all the things that scare us. We have things that scare us too.
In today’s podcast we first talk about some of the things that we DON’T find as scary as most people, like ghosts, things that go bump in the night, Satan, and international terrorism. Then we talk about the things we find genuinely scary:
- Climate change (which may be part of the reason we had thousands of these kudzu bugs infest the garden this fall)
- Widespread ignorance, which makes for fertile ground for
- The rise of demagogues who prey on people’s ignorance and fear
- A breakdown of law and order
- Loss of the reliability of the electrical grid, and with it the constant availability of the Internet
- Outliving our money
- Outliving our friends.
And we finish with where we find comfort, where we find cause for optisism:
- People are basically good
- Neighbors help neigbors
- The resilience of the gift economy
- Our own self reliance
- Our faith in God.