fight or flight

I think this place is full of spies
I think they're onto me
Didn't anybody, didn't anybody tell you
Didn't anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear in a room
I know you put in the hours to keep me in sunglasses, I know
And so and now
I'm sorry I missed you I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way

from The National's "Secret Meeting"

the world is upside down.

like the character in Radiohead's "climbing up the walls," for many of us there seems to be no escaping a maelstrom of uncertainty and despair.

what is real? at our worst, it seems, the only thing we can be sure of is that people will act selfishly and that they will continue to acquire material possessions and then share them with no one. paranoia haunts many of us. faced with a grim economic forecast and the growing, uneasy feeling that all is not right, many of us find ourselves at a crossroads: fight or flight. do we retreat into television and fast food and escape into substances that numb us? or do we hold on to hope and set our faces to stoic resistance to all of the things that are supposed to make this life tolerable instead of meaningful?

I, for one, think that hope is worth holding on to and that fighting the good fight (in this case, not against other people but against a way of life) is not something to be left to old Charlton Heston movies. I am against despair and hopelessness and I will not back down.