About That Person Who Said, "Life is Easy"

It is said about the course of history that there always comes a time when an event, however seemingly insignificant at the time, determines the eventual direction of an outcome. And in the course of enervating election campaigns, critical national referendums, hugely consequential law suits, portentous parliamentary debates et al, it can be said that there always is a public expectation that such an 'earth-shattering', 'game-changing' event is nigh.

It is almost a comment on the evolution of modern society; the much maligned study of instant gratification and its causes, for instance, or the seasonally popular debate on the FoMo (Fear of Missing Out) crisis spreading in an increasingly social media-reliant world. It goes without saying that sometimes these events are actively scripted by the parties involved - a couple of hours spent on that seminal Barry Levinson movie, 'Wag the Dog' (1997) should suffice to illustrate, accompanied by a bewitchingly becalming soundtrack, how these kinds of things could come about.

But are we now seeing the Dawn of an Age of the perpetual anti-climax in relation to our sense about the expected timing of these revelations in the natural order of our lives?
No one expected the events of 9/11 to transpire when they did, surely. They came at a time when public apathy to calamities in the Third World and the environment, to a sense of community participation, to the inequalities and suffering of peoples far removed from our social and economic spheres of influence was at an all-time high, and when music evoking a spirit of nihilism influenced a generation of all-too-eager escapists. But the social upheavals we are seeing right now have only a marginal relation to the events, and the repercussions to the events, of 9/11, even though they seem to occupy a before-and-after kind of epoch-like social significance in the understanding of the modern world. Pandemics have occurred, and were tackled at the time by governments and researchers, long before we discovered their propensity to traverse time-zones and affect the fates of millions of people not immediately responsible for their advent. Innumerable refugee crises followed history-altering changes in the societies of people whose names we still cannot pronounce. Drought, floods, dictator-driven pogroms, and genocide have been happening ever since the dawn of time and continue to happen today.

Why do we only see the significance of these events in relation to our unique place in the history of the world today? Are we becoming a more democratic, less spiritually-distant, more community-oriented, and - dare I say it - less apathetic species with our unparalleled inter-connectivity, our multi-faceted grassroots activism, our ecologically-inspired convictions about leading relatively less-wasteful lives today? Are we finally seeing that every little thing that happens to the least of us, somewhere far away from our immediate orbit, in a distant land, among those with only the most rudimentary of symbolic connections to our own lives, is something that happens to all of us 'here and now' too? Is it possible to ignore the cynicism of daily political discourse, the 'reality' of things as politicians of a certain persuasion are fond of saying, the very real and frightening prospect of large-scale temporary unemployment, and persevere in the search for a new and authentic leadership that courageously faces the naysayers of the world with an absolute conviction about the validity of our tryst with the global community, our pact with the natural world, and our belief in the common good?

Is it possible that all the tools we need to spark the event we have all been waiting for are already at hand, and that all it will take to change our world is to believe that we actually can?