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How ought one respond to threats beyond one's control? What would the shrinks say? Like the 5 stages, denial, anger, something, something, acceptance, blah blah blah? Maybe.
The continuity of the bend over and kiss your ass goodbye philosophy, which came out of the 1950s "Duck and cover" exercises. It is realism. It is like fatalism. Some fatalism is bad, like the Indian caste system, or the Puritan obsession with names written in the "Book of Life." In reading Tarot cards, I'm not comfortable with fatalism at all. I like to think people can make choices, can direct their own lives. And they can, to a point. Then we are not islands, are part of the main, even when the center cannot hold.
Other alternatives? Cower like a daschund under the bed during 4th of July fireworks? Obsess and excessively prepare, like the people building bunkers in the hills? That has a certain appeal for me, since my dad took me camping and taught me all that "be prepared" boy scout philosophy. But it ain't no way to live. Go to Sedona and chant and wait for Scotty to beam you up? Just another version of the same thing as the bunker people, methinks. One favors Christian survivalists and the other New Agers, but they are responding at the same level of fear, or stage of dealing with it.
Wise preparation, that should be a given. You know, shit like they advise on the Red Cross site . Lots of people don't do those things, and then there is a hurricane or fire flood or something, and they don't have fresh water, or all their important papers in a safe place ready to go, or plans made cuz they can't take their dogs into shelters. Denial means over-relying on the system to care for you as well, and not preparing. If you had a child who was a diabetic, you would not respond that way--you could not afford to. You would have your stock of insulin, all the stuff you needed to care for the child in case of emergency. But how many of us wouldn't take care of ourselves as well as we would that diabetic child?
Some schools are making evacuation backpacks for each kid--an interesting variation of a life preserver in a boat, eh? School as boat. The kids don't have to see them or be scared. They can sit in a closet--but they are there.
Then there is fatalism. Knowing that one can only do something up to a certain point--so maybe you make a kind of peace with it. Or think you have, but really just push the thought away, a variation of denial too, but it works most days.
And on? Is there some deeper philosophical truth to be gained from people in civilized, first world places where the refrigerator is always running, having to live with one foot in the wild world of tooth and claw?
Did civilization slay all the dragons, to the point that we don't know how to deal with dragons anymore? Eloi from H.G. Wells's The Time Machine?" Lulled ourselves into lambs for the slaughter?
What if there were some lesson to be learned by living under a threat--lessons Israelis could tell us loads about?
I'm struck by the scenes of the movie Brazil, where the main character is around his mother, and always there is some bomb going off. Gilliam probably put that in there from IRA craziness more than anything. But it is there. The people sit at a restaurant. A bomb goes off several tables over. They continue eating after the wounded are carried away.
I don't think we want to live inside that fatalistic space. Don't want the other extreme either, constant fear and an armed camp. Where is the wisdom? What sort of attitude toward this stuff do the wise grow into? We should watch and learn from them.
Tibetians? Surely prosecuted. Exiles. Strong religious and monastic traditions, traditions that while fatalistic at time, can also be activist (I am thinking of Buddhist monks during Vietnam War). Do they have wisdom while under siege, at least enough to learn from?
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