Some more tea, Alice?

The world is slowly going insane. Or is that "has slowly gone insane?" Proof of this lies in this article, I think...

"The report, authored by Professor Anders Wimo of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden and Professor Martin Prince at the Institute of Psychiatry of King's College London in the United Kingdom, also says the number of people with dementia is expected to double by 2030 and more than triple by 2050."


It seems that we are living longer than ever before but we can't handle what we see around us. I don't want to make fun of dementia, my mother died with Alzheimer's, it's a terrible thing to watch happen to a loved one. In my mother's case, she seemed comfortable with it. She accepted it, in a sense, though she took medicine to stall it off, to slow its progress. The medicine seemed to work. Over the years the disease progressed, she grew more childlike and withdrew further from the world. Her last concerns about the world or the country were shortly after 9/11/2001. She simply stopped paying attention to anything outside her immediate surroundings.

In a sense, I wanted to join her. I would have liked to pretend the rest of the world did not exist. Turn my head and ignore the things that have happened in the last 9 years. Maybe that's why dementia is on the rise, people can't comprehend what is happening and feel helpless to change it.

Still, I have been hearing and reading about how the world is going mad from my earliest memories. We seemed to increase our tolerance for life's inexplicable twists and turns. We couldn't make it improve so we rationalized it, we accommodated it, we let it become our reality.

The Cold War was a kind of global madness. It even used the acronym "MAD" which stood for Mutual Assured Destruction. The concept was that the two main superpowers of the world would develop and stockpile weapons and delivery systems that would assure the complete destruction of any attacker. Picture two people standing 5 feet apart holding explosives in one hand and a "dead man" switch in the other. If one explodes his bomb, the other will too. No one wins. Well, that was the world I grew up in.

The Cold War ended. Both superpowers allegedly stopped targeting each other. They also allegedly stopped meddling in the affairs of third world countries in an ideological battle to gather these countries into one camp or the other and to prevent advantage by the other side. Essentially, the world went mad soon after the first atomic bombs were successfully developed. And we all lived inside that madness for 45 years.

And then it ended. Not with the bang we expected. But with a whimper. And it seemed like the "good guys" won. To me. But then I lived in the superpower which triumphed and did not appear, to me, to press its new found advantage.

There was a brief period of joy, of relief, of hope. Until we began to realize that we drove a lot of people bonkers during that Cold War. People who now saw an opportunity to act out that madness. And have.

The attacks on 9/11/2001 were not the first indicators of this, just the loudest, the most horrific. No longer was it just random acts of nature that threatened people in large numbers. Instead of nations with relatively sane leaders vying for world dominance, we have small groups and charismatic leaders dragging us all into their personal delusions.

It's no wonder people are escaping into dementia in greater numbers each year.