A Word From Chicken Little

Remember the classic tale about Chicken Little telling everyone the sky was falling in? Well, it did the other day on an otherwise sunny Chicago morning....!

There are those rare cosmic moments when the contradictions in our life somehow clarify life. When the ironies to our existence somehow produce insight to that existence. If that sounds appealing, stay with me here. It happened just a few weeks ago to thousands of us driving to work. There we were, with all this vehicular power and gadgetry, feeling in push-button control of our world. Until, that is, we turned on our radio.

Within a matter of minutes, we learn just how little control we actually have. The news ticks off a series of totally dislocating events. Our Governor impeached....our Tribune files for bankruptcy... Detroit's big three in worse shape than we thought.... Wall Street CEO's more guilty than we knew...and all those supplements that cancer patients like me have been taking now shown virtually useless.

The word "dislocating" is apt, because each of these things has been a reliable anchor to our lives. Now suddenly ripped away from us, we're once more left dislocated and adrift. Precisely as the waters we travel grow darker and deeper.

Now it's reasonable to expect many of these matters will work out in time. And yet, time is exactly what we have so little of. So we're anxious. And we're angry. Isn't there anything left in this world that we can count on!

The stunning contradictions and ironies here are that we exist in an age of startling powers, and yet few if any of these power seem to empower us. What is there on our gleaming power panels that will stem crime in high places? keep my newspaper alive? keep Detroit and its workers from becoming a ghost town? and when can I ever again believe anything any pharmaceutical company or bank tells me?

By the time I reach the Loop and drive through its proud canyons of steel and glass, I can 't help thinking of this not so much as a great city, but as a great cave. Like the ancient cave dwellers who used their's to hide away from the terrors of their world . But that's not the way it was supposed be. Civilization and all its powers promised us, unlike our ancient cave-dwelling ancestors, we would be masters of all we survey.

Musing over that unfulfilled promise, now comes the final contradiction and irony. My parking lot is full....!

I hear science is toying with the notion of using DNA deposits to resurrect neanderthal mammoths and men. The way I feel this messy news morning, both the mammoths and the men would feel perfectly at home in our wild age of dislocating terrors. Perhaps reminding us -- and them -- that true security will always come not from the power of my power panels, but from the power of my own inner humanity.