{"id":149,"date":"2015-02-07T21:20:46","date_gmt":"2015-02-07T21:20:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lawrencedavis.org\/?p=149"},"modified":"2015-02-14T16:08:05","modified_gmt":"2015-02-14T16:08:05","slug":"thoughts-after-the-end-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/2015\/02\/thoughts-after-the-end-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts After the End of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Originally published by Lawrence Davis on January 11, 2013]<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Armageddon\"I am happy to announce that the world did not end on December 21st. This means that the History Channel now has about a thousand hours of programming with the words \u201cMaya\u201d and \u201cApocalypse\u201d in the title. They were played on a 7 day\/24 hour endless loop on cable TV through the whole month of December. I wonder if the Mayans will lose their reputation, built over centuries, because this prediction just didn\u2019t come true. I also worry about the History Channel, but much much less. I hope they will be turning their attention away from impending doom. As one of James Thurber\u2019s cartoon characters once said about the evening news. \u201cWhy can\u2019t they be more cheerful about the world?\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, we don\u2019t have to rely on ancient predictions from South America for dire apocalyptic visions. We have Washington, DC. I am also happy to announce that we did not fall off the fiscal cliff. That\u2019s awfully good news. The two lost tribes that inhabit our nation\u2019s capital managed to terrify us with creepy threats to push us off the edge of the abyss, and then, at the precise moment we were dangling, our knuckles white, we found out there was no cliff at all. Just talk of a cliff. It was all like a bad TV program that just ended. Now it\u2019s on to something else. As Dr. Neil Postman once observed, there are no priorities on television. Everything is equally important. Take a typical evening news cast. \u201cThousands of people died in Syria today, the North Koreans sent a rocket into the atmosphere, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are having a baby, and now this from our sponsor, Pringle\u2019s Potato Chips.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where does all of this leave us? Each and every one of us is left to sort it all out. We all look for those moorings familiar to us \u2014 values we can hold on to, things that we know and believe in. Like when my student piano quintet plays Shostakovich. It is difficult to describe what it\u2019s like hearing five wonderful young performers discover the majesty in that piece. It makes all of the endless chatter about Armageddon and fiscal failure go away. Such is the power of absolute expression.<\/p>\n

Lawrence Davis<\/p>\n

______________<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the ninth essay that <\/em>Lawrence<\/em> posted on his blog “Reaching In.”\u00a0 It originally appeared at lawrence-davis.blogspot.com. – <\/em>CHC<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Originally published by Lawrence Davis on January 11, 2013] I am happy to announce that the world did not end on December 21st. This means that the History Channel now has about a thousand hours of programming with the words \u201cMaya\u201d and \u201cApocalypse\u201d in the title. They were played on a 7 day\/24 hour endless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reaching-in-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/ldavis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}