The world might come to an end

Last week I was going about my daily business one morning when I heard two stories in short succession on public radio that really put the fear of god (or whatever) into me. Or not so much that, but stories that really gave me paws.

One was the news that the Chinese stock market had fallen hugely, and the American stock market had tumbled in response. The other was a story about the mysterious deaths of bees. I had heard news about the bees a couple of times before, but this time it seemed both more urgent and more mysterious. Previously "they" had said that bees were suffering from attacks by something called the varroa mite; essentially a tick that preys on bees, latching on to their tiny bodies and sucking their juices until they die. But now the bee problem had widened to the unexplained deaths of large number of bees in California - bees that are trucked from field to field in the spring in order to pollinate crops.

The two stories just made me aware of... not the fragility of life, but the fragility of this culture, this society that we live in and the networks of high-tech transit and virtual information that we depend on, and the fact that there really is no guarantee that this will all still exist five or ten years from now.

Of course humans are adaptible creatures, and were all the bees to die off there would no doubt be crowds of human pollinators in the fields ensuring that our crops of vegetables and grain would still grow to maturity. But the change; oh the change. Perhaps it would become exceedingly common for people to have vegetable gardens in their back yards... a return to the victory garden. The survival garden?

And the stock market thing just makes me ponder the invisible making and unmaking of money, and the marvel and mystery of people devoting their lives and their fortunes to something so unreal. I do it too, of course. Got a nice 401k goin' on. I'd be bummed if it went away due to the machinations of public opinion. Which it wouldn't, of course. I'm still saving for the long haul - I don't care if it fluctuates.

Things change. People change. Interest rates fluctuate.