"Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Give Up"

By Guest Blogger Jay in (not of) Los Angeles

We aren't in a new "depression'. No, our current American misery is more active than those images we've all seen on TV commercials selling anti-depressants. A woman looks out of a window, expressionless. A man rubs his elbows, staring off into space. For some reason there's a cat, looking concerned.

No, our current misery is a verb, not an adjective. We're in The Great Worry.

The political parties that previously hung over us like steel umbrellas, no matter on which side we fell, haven't withstood the heat--test and have turned gooey and overly malleable for people with a more centered way of looking at the country and the world. The far left and the far right met up in a cheap motel sometime in the last decade and gave birth to The Great Worry.

But I found something while poking around news websites that has, in a morbid way, helped to lessen the burden of The Great Worry perpetrated upon us by our domestic unease. Something to worry about that I'd really never even considered worrying about.

Would it even cross your mind to say to a scientist, "Please make sure that anything you're working on won't have the side effect of creating a black hole that swallows the Earth whole?"

I really wouldn't have thought to ask. I'd have thought it was sort of universally assumed that even a .01 percent chance of a project creating a planet devouring black hole would be considered 'too risky'.

See, sometimes it's all about the questions you ask. And sometimes it's about the questions you wouldn't think to ask.

Exhibit A: Scientists discount possibility of "killer strangelet"

In other words: before voting for Barack Obama, please ask some pertinent questions. I suggest starting with, "Change is great -- but to what? And how?"

Though I'd avoid any allusion to "black holes', for obvious reasons.

I've decided that if I'm to endure The Great Worry, I'm not doing so quietly.

Jay in (not of) L.A.