THERE'S A LEAK IN THE BOILER ROOM

When anything happens, people tend to shirk away from it. With the help of popular phrases such as "that's the way the cookie crumbles," they wash their hands thoroughly of any causative remnants. Seems to me, it's highly unlikely that a cookie's crumb will determine anything.
Some people don't like to be bothered with the presence of catastrophes at all-- to such an extent that they will drown themselves in whatever infantile passion they can lay their hands on: dating shows, reality shows, quiz shows, MTV, commercials, pornography, etc. There are enough shows out there to make it entirely unnecessary for anyone to ever move again. Why should they? They've got life handed out to them in little vibrant dots 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
But there are other favorite pastimes: drugs, food (the more colorful, cheaper, and bigger, the better), and, perhaps the greatest passion of them all, shopping. I do believe people go shopping with far greater fervor and crazed dedication in their veins than the workaholic executive who approaches the conference table of his multi-million dollar firm.
Many people make the core of their universe something so despicable, so insignificant or primitive, that it will cut off any strands that would tie them to the world and the sorry state it lies in. They will do anything trivial enough if it will enable them to be oblivious to the truth. Because the truth, after all, is a cunning phenomena that takes work, research, and skepticism to attain-- and to what end? Only to be rewarded with a reality far more terrifying than your imagination has hitherto let you wander into. It's much more comfortable, instead, to tend to one's own little existence. And if one has to worry about something, let it be about why Harry didn't call you back last night after he promised he would. Let it be about the fact that your archenemy bought the same shoes as you. Let it be about the rent money or the hangover. Let it be about sex or carpet stains. Something that involves and yields all the drama one can ask for, while at the same time requiring no real substance of any kind. Something that will occupy every minute of the mundane and, in doing so, make it entirely impossible to even once glimpse out into the broad panorama. Something that is really nothing at all.
Well, yes, ignorance is bliss.
But it's all an illusion to a lesser or greater extent. There is no bliss if it is only in your personal cubic yard. Eventually everything that crumbles around you will fall. And when it does, it will tear everything down with it-- even that well-tended cubic yard. It's a shocking fact to come to terms with. Tragic, to think that one is stuck with having to care about the welfare of everything-- the world, the people within it-- and that countries on distant continents are your concern just as much as the people mowing their lawn next door. That everything is connected. Maybe it can rightly be labeled a "pain in the ass". But no matter what you may want to label it, it remains a solid fact that the ground millions of miles away, far into mythical distances, is still the same ground you are standing on here.
There have always been evil people that one can blame the great catastrophes of history on, and most likely there always will be. The disturbing fact is not that these people exist, but rather that everyone else seems to be barbecuing bargain sausages while the world slides rapidly into its uneasy end.