Where you sit, you're being spun at roughly 800 miles an hour on a planetary axis and slung at 67,000 miles an hour around an ongoing series of thermonuclear reactions. You're also hurtling at half a million by this measure of velocity through mostly empty space. Oh, and you're riding a lake of fire on a crust riven with tense fractures that forcefully shift several million times a year.
All this, and at the moment, you don't feel a thing.
But there are times when you do. Times when the water's surface ceases to be still. Times when all sense of stability is shattered.
Some of these moments are physically brutal to their victims and felt collectively by survivors, like Boston or Newtown or — god, how the list goes on. Others are wickedly emotional but essentially private, like the death of a loved one by any cause, or the end of a cherished relationship.
It doesn't matter which, or what. The point is you had things the way you wanted them, or at least you knew things the way you had them, and now everything has changed.
In the case of public safety, the consequence of recurring acts of mass violence (call it terrorism whether it's geopolitically motivated or not) is that we are compelled toward a social environment in which our movements are monitored and restricted. Or in the case of the public purse — since human suffering presents in many forms, of which bodily harm is merely the most appalling — it's that because of past decisions, the social safety net cannot be preserved, and that progress will be reversed out of necessity, not just a poverty of generosity.
We'll adapt, because we're wise enough to know, when we're honest, that change is the only constant. What we don't necessarily pay heed to is the manner in which it frequently occurs: the deceptive stillness of incubation followed by abrupt actualization. From acts of violence to financial failings and beyond, we're forever wondering why no one connected the dots, although we may be blissfully unaware when someone has.
This week, the implications of change came before the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices attempted to connect some mind-boggling dots during oral arguments over whether human genes can be patented, and thus controlled by corporations. Although the justices had agreed to take on the case and presumably knew what they were getting into, even they seemed struck by its complexity, needing to break down the discussion into analogies like cookie recipes or baseball bats. We trust that they'll be technical experts by the time they rule, yet it feels shocking — does it not? — to have arrived at a moment when our very makings may be mined like gold.
