Just what we need to hear this week

Aside from the usual barrage of opinions and news tidbits, from time to time we see articles of one stripe or another that, without taking a position, or even mentioning an issue, will color our thinking in some significant but indirect way. This is a powerful form of literature/journalism, and it has been employed for centuries. Some written works, (Charles Dicken's novels, the commentaries of Mark Twain and Eric Blair--writing as George Orwell, as well as Hitler's Mein Kampf, stand out), when seen in the context of the times that they were written and read in, are greatly elevated in their significance.

In the 21st century, in the age of instant information and issues whose lives are measured sometimes in days or hours, we have the internet and a plethora of printed periodicals whose writings lend guidance to out thoughts, by giving us factual information, interpretations of events and trends, or by shifting the perceiption of those in some way or another. These are the literature of our era. The value of books, novels, essays and treatises produced this year cannot be fairly judged for a long time. These things take time to research and produce, they cannot keep pace with the times that we live in.

With that in mind, I offer these articles that appeared in Slate, the online news and commentary site.


1) How To Survive a Nuclear Bomb

Just thinking through this scenario will intellectually and emotionally link to our impressions of world events, and possibly influence our reactions to the information we ingest and digest.

2) How To Survive the Avian Flu, Smallpox, or Plague

This article will also influence or perceiptions and possibly reactions to events, but in a different way. There is no intellectual illusion of a solution to that problem, only the omniscient probability of its coming to pass, therefore it will tend to ratchet up tensions and emotions in all other issues that we as individuals and as a society deal with.

3) How To Survive an Earthquake

This article will have a similar effect, albeit not quite as much owing to the fact that this is not new, or hitherto unexperienced. Most of us figure that we will roll with the punches and see what happens next.


The first of these, while informational and probably true, will have a tendency to color our thinking on current events. The second and third, while related, do not have the impact in our world that the first does. This is not to assign any motivations to the publishers, it is simply to note that our thinking might be temporarily or permanently affected, (temporarily = until we take in other information to reinforce previously held views, thus negating the attitudinal shift or new information that shifts thinking in another direction).

The presentation of these topics, the timing and the venue may serve some motive that is not immediately clear, or not. The relevance of these articles to anything in particular is also unclear.


I am going shopping now, to stock up on potassium iodine pills.