Human beings have a love-hate relationship with bad news. On one hand, they of course do not want to hear bad news because it means trouble for them. On the other hand, there is a somewhat perverse fascination with bad news because it confirms what they feel in their bones to be an unpleasant truth: this world is a screwed-up place.

As the developed world enters a period of economic depression, there are of course many folks everywhere who don't want to hear this bad news.

Back in the developing world, bad news is no big deal.  Shit happens every day. These people grew up with poverty and dearth. Bad news is no stranger to them. It's just another hurdle along the course of overcoming the array of obstacles that are stacked against them in their pulling of themselves up by proverbial bootstraps.

This denial of bad news is nothing new in the history of man. In the ancient nation of Israel a guy named Jeremiah tried to tell the last three or four kings of a waning dynasty that they would have to make peace with, and comply with, the demands of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. But the kingdom leaders gave Jeremiah a hell of a hard time, put him prison, threw him in a pit, humiliated him publicly. They wanted to kill the bearer of bad news. But in the end Jeremiah's dire predictions were shown to be correct, and their little kingdom of  mediocre nepotism and abuse crumbled under the onslaught of Nebuchadnezzar's army. And Babylonian hegemony descended upon them like AIDS on a sleeparounder. Seventy years of Babylonian captivity ensued.

A similar scenario developed about six hundred year later in that same location, Jerusalem. The powers that be, comprised of Roman empire leaders and local religious leaders, were warned that their little moshpit of legalist politics would be severely rearranged and ultimately cut off. Wise men had tried to warn them that this would happen. But the special interest-protectors  had not wanted to hear it, and had chosen instead to humiliate the bearers of unpleasant news. Shoot-the-messenger syndrome struck again. Forty or so years later, a Roman general named Titus conquered Israel and forced the dispersal of its inhabitants.

 These days, a plain-dealing  leader comes along and tells spoiled citizens that they're going to have to tighten their belts and learn to conserve resources--and to share those limited resources with each other and with others of meager means--and they don't want to hear that.  It becomes bad news to them.  Again, they want to shoot the messenger.

 Many people, lamenting the demise of a leveraged prosperity that has seemingly brought a chicken to every pot and a car to every garage,  react vindictively to the bearers of what they consider to be bad news. Some extreme persons invent conspiracy theories by which they wrap their worst fears in constructs of legitimacy. Stuntifying loudmouths invent false accusations and toss them out indiscriminately as verbal grenades to destroy our fragile civility.

Other scheming smartasses unleash voyeuristic videos concocted to leverage half-truths, hearsay and circumstantial evidence, not to mention mean unsubstantiated gossip-- into slander with which they purport to discredit their enemies. People generally apply their various genii to smearing their opponents in the mud, similar to the vengeful barbs that their Cro-magnon ancestors had  wielded in ages past. The ever-widening vortex of entropic uncivility expands to capture the depraved imaginations of tubed-up  millions on both ends of the dissipating spectrum (I can't hear you; you're breaking up); the center cannot hold.

Meanwhile back in the civilized rationality of scientific inquiry, evidence is uncovered in the exquisite intricacy of one DNA molecule (times thousands of genes in multiple chromosomes in billions of cells in thousands of organisms) to support the possibility of intelligence in the universe that predates life itself and perhaps even wants to redeem this species from their hopeless wrestling with existential alienation, and folks want to shoot the messenger instead of heeding a message of audacious hope, because it upends their little kingdom of intellectual construct of secularity by enthroning natural selection as the god of our age. Eugenics and euthanasia cannot be far behind.

Cultured elites are forced to disown their disruptively lunatic bedfellows. Brownshirt brutishness seeks to strangle kindness. Rudeness insults politeness to death. Hate tramples love into the dust. Across the hissing-lawn quad a learned scholar murmers about newborn babies, referring to the little ones as planet-burdening "carbon emitters."  All hell breaks loose. The center cannot hold.

I hope not. You gotta believe we can still pull this great American experiment together before it falls apart.

Carey Rowland, author of Glass half-Full