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Apr. 22, 2011 For several years now, an idea has been nagging me. It all started one sunny day on the way home from the dentist. As I was walking into my local grocery store, I observed some little girls playing “ring around the rosy”. It suddenly struck me as odd that, in the 21st century, children would still be singing this childhood rhyme. It made me rethink my vision of the future. Like so many others, my vision of the future included space ships, ray guns, aliens, and an absence of acne (ok, maybe that last one is just a desperate hope). But those children opened up a new aspect of the future that I hadn’t considered before. This question started to fascinate me. With all the advancements in science and technology, why were ghost stories still told in this day and age? Why was Halloween still celebrated in a multi-cultural, pluralistic, and sophisticated society? If our modern attitudes were still haunted today, would they be haunted tomorrow? So, my vision of the future started to change. Would there be dark corners on star ships that only fools dared to tread? Would we be sailing past haunted moons and telling ourselves it’s all in our minds? Would our great-grandchildren be trick-or-treating on mars? If we met alien cultures, would they be able to cure us of our primal nightmares, or simply add to them? The question seemed beyond the relationship of human beings and fear. As our society has evolved, so have our fears. We now fear serial killers and aliens. We fear terrorists armed with biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. But with all these new kids on the block of our collective unconscious, the old fears were still lurking, just beyond the dusky horizon. But it all kept coming back to fear: we fear what we cannot control or explain. If you read ghost stories, the question comes up again and again: “Do you believe in ghosts?” The question is not “Can you prove the existence of ghosts?” Despite all our science and cognitive prowess, we seem to have automatically tossed that question in the garbage. It’s as if our fear of the supernatural is more powerful than our faith in science. We could from this superficial examination of this issue conclude that what we fear is death: we are faced with things from beyond the grave, which brings up the whole matter of our limited existence. But what about demonic possession? Movies such as The Exorcist can still scare most people right out of the room. The only conclusion I can draw at this time is that this whole matter involves the relationship between science and the threats in the shadows that we cannot fully understand (and therefore control). It doesn’t seem logical (an odd term to use in this discussion) that it boils down to fear of the unknown. Most people don’t understand how giant gas nebulas millions of light years away form; how many horror movies or novels are there about giant gas nebulas? We are still burdened by these persistent myths of ghosts, demons, and things that go bump in the night. This shadowy, cobwebbed corner of our mind cannot be cured by our modern perspective and still unsettles us. It will be interesting to see if the ghosts and monsters are finally banished to forgotten lore in the coming decades. Will they die with us, or will they quietly wait in the shadows of the brave new world, waiting to scare the daylights out of our great-great grandchildren?
So this is my submission to the compendium of useless knowledge. Is it really useless though? Do you have the courage to look over your shoulder and find out?
Further reading:
If you are interested in seeing what else my mind is capable of, you can visit me at www.scribid.com. I have two books of poetry, “Play-Doh from Heaven” and “They Came to My Door” awaiting you there. I also have several short stories that are sitting on that web site, daring you to read them.
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