It's cool by the Pool - right? [COLUMN]

Above picture courtesy Casey van der Leek Snr.
In ‘Independence Day’ the world was something worth defending. In ‘Day After Tomorrow,’ the message was, ‘We’ll go down if we don’t stop what we’re doing,’ and in ‘2012,’ ‘We’re going down no matter what.’

I posted the above as a status update on Facebook and the consensus was an acceptance that we're going down. I guess this is because all of believe someone else is in control. That may be true, but ultimately, we do have a say over our own lives.

We can manage our own health, our own homes and maintain a holistic [balanced] approach to the world. And, of course, we can stand guard to what goes into our hearts. The temptation will be to vent, to be bitter and angry. Will this serve our communities, our families, or endanger them?

As far as I'm concerned, the most sensible approach we ought to have to modern times is the pursuit of health. Healthy eating, healthy living, healthy habits. When you care about yourself, you can begin to care about others, and the state of your own country, and the world. I don't believe we're in a place where we really care about ourselves beyond shallow vanities and consumerist impulses. Real caring is deeper, and more difficult. The discipline to lose weight, to not indulge every desire. The ability eventually, to look beyond ourselves, to look at others, and to listen to them, and to look to a world that cannot speak, but in its skies and from what can be read in the leaves and grasses we ought to know a deeper truth about our world.

We have four options.
To panic, to lash out: One soldier who attended the memorial said the mood at Fort Hood was turning from sadness to anger as soldiers learned more about Hasan's background.

To pretend it's business as usual: A total of 946,400 passenger cars were sold in China in October, up sharply from 538,500 units sold a year earlier.

To be endlessly distracted, to postpone reality indefinitely: Welcome to the ADD Generation

Or to fess up and face up, and mitigate our accumulating troubles.

The fourth option requires courage and discipline and the support of partners, families, communities. It's starting, slowly. You can be part of the solution by starting, today, to care about your health, and those around you, and then looking into the sky and into the neighborhoods and caring about what you see, or don't see. Enough to take action.