posted on Sep, 17 2012 @ 07:13 PM
Very interested to encounter this thread, because I've been feeling the same as most people who have posted, especially over the last month or so and
intensified over the last week or so. With me, I think it's a natural reaction to all the news rather than a "premonition", and I'm not a "2012"
person, so to speak. The danger of SHTF is definitely there in multiple places, and disasters usually occur when there are a number of factors that go
wrong at once, rather than just one. Being naturally a bit anxious, I thought others wouldn't be feeling quite as bad, but clearly a number of people
are. It would be nice to get through these feelings to a point where I could act constructively on the situation and maybe then be in a position to
strengthen others who start getting them a bit later because they don't follow the news quite as closely. A friend's reaction was unexpected - she
said, try taking a high-dose vitamin B! To my surprise, this does make me feel a lot less of that general anxiety about the situation in the world,
and more focused, for several hours.
I think part of the feeling is that some of what's going on makes it prudent to be vigilant, over an extended period of time, in areas where a person
who really wants to know what's going on has to dig for the information. For example, since Fukushima, being vigilant about the spread of
radioactivity in the face of limited information about the continued leakage situation long after it has left the news. Then there's trying to make
sense of how the economic situation may affect us and how to prepare for that, and all the crazy things going on in international politics. We have
crazy, though smaller, local decisions going on everywhere as well, some of which may need some action, and vigilance because you manage to divert the
craziness once but then the people who want it find ways to keep putting it back on the agenda - for example, in England at the moment, the
kill-everything-because-we-really-like-it-but-want-to-rationalise-that brigade have managed to get an illogical badger cull going again instead of the
much more sensible approach that some other countries adopt of vaccinating cattle, and even badgers themselves, against TB. The excuse given is that
bureaucrats have been incapable of getting the system together for vaccination - bureaucracy does have a habit of tending towards ineffectiveness, but
equally, there's always an excuse for what manipulators want to do, until they get their way. We have been experiencing a lot more of this, in
multiple areas, including a lot of public service situations as well as corporate ones and "findings" in the research world - it used to be called
"corruption", but these days perhaps the truth is more skilfully hidden. Another example - I was horrified, a while ago, to take part in a
think-tank-type exercise to make some changes in a part of the NHS, only to find that the people running it had already come to their conclusions
before they started it and their idea of this was that it was an exercise in making people feel they had been consulted, while persuading them around
to accepting what they had predetermined (I believe this is part of what is called a "Delphi" technique. Pleased to say they didn't entirely get
it their own way, but because they didn't, the process went on for years longer than expected, and even now they are trying again.) The contributor
who said we need to have information in the open is spot on.
Going back to the wider geopolitical world, we genuinely are in a more fragile situation than we were even at the times of the Cuba missile crisis and
Suez, and the danger is that if many hazards that we are being vigilant about don't materialise, or don't do so for a long time, we start to wonder
whether we really need to pay so much attention to them. Then when you least expect it - as another person said - something actually does happen that
you would have liked to have been prepared for. To go back to the beginning, perhaps the trick is to keep an informed eye on everything while learning
to become more resilient within ourselves. We also need to be able to discern when interest groups are deliberately making us concerned about things
that sound serious but are really decoys away from genuine developments - there are a lot of those at the moment as well, but they can be hard to
identify. For example, how many people have the time to unpick the recent claims about the systematic review of organic food, to discover the flaws
in that and the corporate links? Many people probably just listen to the "experts" that present on each side of any argument, as if their views
carried equal weight because that's how the media has taken to portraying everything, and conclude that nobody really knows the truth about anything
at all, while others develop an "only-we-are-right" syndrome and dig their heels in. To get anywhere, I think we need to move beyond both of those
reactions.