"Sometimes I feel like a farmer during a war, someone who doesn't know very much about it and carries on digging, hoping for rain. But just the last few days I've had this terrible feeling of... doom. It's a, er, biblical, kind of Old Testament feeling. I'm an atheist, but I was suddenly thinking of those stories of the flood and punishment. Because we've become unbelievably greedy and destructive." Helen Mirren interviewed by Simon Garfield, The Independent (London), 25 November 1990, The Sunday Review Pages, Pg 27

This woman is amazing- in so many ways.  and she expresses here a feeling that has been hanging over me for months.  At one point, I had to give up listening to the news and turn my head every time I  walked past a newspaper.  Some days I feel as if that's still my best option; I have to give something up or I'll have to give up my hope.  The more attention I pay to the state of politics, or the state of the planet, or the state of general human relations, the less I feel like trying.  I want to throw myself into a heaping pile of hedonism.  

I have to keep reminding myself, however, that doomsayers have been around as long as man has been around.  The difference is, they are now CONSTANTLY IN YOUR FACE... Screaming at you not from street corners, wearing rags and lice and sandwich boards.  Now they are on every every screen in every room in every house.  They are on our handhelds and the ones who scream the loudest (with the scariest messages) are the ones whose voices reverberate even in the digital universe. The echoes of our speech, every word we put out digitally, is read and re-read, and words that were said decades, centuries ago and now being dragged out into the light and tested for gravity.  In some ways, this is good.  In some ways, it is tragic, because no matter what the comment, everyone has something to say about it, and it's not always the original interpretation that carries across the web.  Even current events (perhaps even ESPECIALLY current events) are taken and repurposed before they're even digested.  Everyone is busy polishing shit and photographing it from a different angle, thinking a change in lighting or angle proves the original intent was different.  It becomes overwhelming.  And if we listen too much to the tragedy of miscommunication, we become doomsayers ourselves.  

Humanity has survived this long.  If we fail to survive this millenium, we do so of our own accord, because we failed to find our better natures, we failed to shut out the doomsayers.  We found comfort in avarice.  I, for one, am definitely hoping for survival.  I just need to learn to listen for the voices outside the doom.