On September 22nd four people were killed and 17 others were injured in the shooting in Birmingham when a number of attackers got out of a vehicle and opened fire on a crowd in a public area before fleeing the scene. But, this is just one of hundreds of  shooting. For each of the last four years there have been more than 600 mass shootings – almost two a day on average. The deadliest such attack, in Las Vegas in 2017, killed more than 50 people and left 500 wounded.  This just one aspect of the crises around the world involving wars, starvation and massive financial, political and crises of  unrest. It is a situation depicted in the 1976 film Network that had a message which is relevant today.  The film features anchor newscaster for evening news, Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, who won a posthumous Oscar for the role. Beale becomes mentally unbalanced and  while broadcasting the news, he goes on a unhinged rant telling his television audience:

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our tee-vees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like every thing’s going crazy. So we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my tee-vee and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything, just leave us alone. well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad.! I don’t want you to protest, I don’t want you to riot, I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad! You’ve got to say:’I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!‘ So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

That scene captures the state of the world today. Wars, starvation, oppression, religious violence and a list too long to repeat summarizes our world in 2024 with no solution in sight. The world situation includes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel and Palestinian war, lawlessness world wide all with the resulting human tragedy. The economic world situation has caused hundreds of millions of families to suffer. Inflation has become a clear and present danger for many countries, including ordinary citizens in this country and around the world. This includes climate change, homlessness, poverty, immigration and all the many other world wide crisis conditions.

There is a pervasive feeling of helplessness among people of the world. There is no easy solution and the world wide impact grows each day.  For Americans, one thing we can do is to vote into office leaders who have the national interest and not their personal political or financial interests at heart. What we need is  legislation that fairly balances the economics among citizens instead of a situation where there are the rich and the poor. Our country needs constitutional balance restored between the executive, legislative and judicial powers and not a country in which a  president can brag he appointed politically biased members of the highest court to accomplish his political goals through the courts. It’s likely that will have to wait another four years before we have the opportunity to accomplish these goals through elections again. Today we are at a place where our democracy will be tested over the next four years.  Let’s hope that in spite of the national  political divisons there will nevetheless be a better national and international governing policy. Other than hope, we don’t have any other choice except prayer.