Sunday, August 18, 2013

Something Strange and Deadly: Book Club Discussion #2

A bit behind, I'm barely getting this discussion in on time!  After a very busy week: the beginning of a new school year, a birthday that I'm now sharing with my wonderful best friend's adorable one-year old daughter, and the bumped up release of Fire and Ash by Jonathan Maberry (not to mention the fact that a book I've been dying to read, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by new author April Genevieve Tucholke, came out the day before my shared birthday), it's no wonder I nearly forgot to do this week's Something Strange and Deadly book club discussion!  So on to this week's question:



Question: Magic and ghostly elements frequent the Something Strange and Deadly series. Even though corpses do awaken from time to time and hauntings are hardly that uncommon, the people of Philadelphia seem determined to pretend the Dead are not a growing threat.
Do you think that’s part of human nature? To push on and ignore the danger at our door? Or do you think Philadelphia’s ignorance—or for that matter, any ignorance/false sense of safety in modern days as well—can be pinned on politicians? Can you think of any examples where something similar happened, but rather than the Dead, it was a natural disaster/growing crime rate/etc.?

From far and wide, it's completely normal and common for humans to turn a blind eye to danger that's staring them down.  There are so many examples that can be used to back this up, from the swine flu outbreak in 2009 that many ignored and refused vaccines until it became widespread (my then 8-year old nephew, in spite of having received a flu vaccine a week earlier, contracted this horrible disease, thanks to many sick people out and about in public.  Thankfully he healed in about a week!), to the wide-spread avian flu pandemics through Asia in 2007 and 2009, to terrorist attacks and the violence in the Middle East and particularly Egypt, and last but not least, sex scandals, such as the Sandusky admissions to various Catholic church officials, where abuse lasted for years, yet many who knew the facts simply swept the truths under guilty rugs.

The world's biggest woe is, by far, global warming.  Something that touches every part of the planet, global warming is something that's constantly in the news, yet many like to say things like, "Oh, it's not as bad as the news lets on," yet pictures and videos showing the devastating melting of the polar ice caps, to deforestation and the loss of countless species of animals, are proof that global warming is our biggest threat.  But look around and many, many people don't seem at all worried about the destruction we're causing our home world.  Global warming is probably the biggest danger at all our doors that people from all walks of life, from rich to poor, from race to race, that most of us choose to pretend is not really there and will not affect us in the long run.  And I don't think this is something that will ever change within human nature.

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