The world is ending: Everybody Panic

The other day I was sleeping on the couch sans shirt when a knock happened at the door. I did what any sane person does when they here a knock, I crept over to the door and placed myself at an angle where I could see the face of the person on my doorstep, but they couldn't see me. Sure enough, it was Jehovah's Witness.

Listen, I've taken pamphlets on three separate occasions during the time I've lived in this house. I've stood at the door and talked about the excellent advice proffered in the book of James. Zip it. That's new revised standard. But on this day, I hid. I walked into the kitchen and told S that we had visitors as the door. Well, to be honest, we whispered it to one another. And while we stood in the kitchen whispering to one another a nice older woman stood on our front porch with a pamphlet about the imminence of the end times. After she'd left the front porch I watched outside my small window as the volunteers met in the middle of our street and talked to one another. At one point I hid because I thought they could see my face from forty five feet away and up a hill. Apparently I thought that they were bald eagles or something. And I watched as they piled back into their cars and drove off to some other neighborhood to spread the good word.

Why exactly did I hide from people who wanted to talk about something that we have in common? Why am I generally afraid of answering the door at all? Is it part and parcel with living in a city that we desire our own private space? Is the private space idea enhanced by me being a privacy and individuality loving American?

It made me wonder about things like Fox News and MSNBC, and the people you don't hide on your facebook feed, and how we're inclined in this new information age to only have the information filtered in our direction that we want to hear. Such that, an article in The Atlantic about how Sarah Palin wasn't actually a terrible governor in Alaksa and worked across party lines comes out of the blue. I thought all she did was build a bridge to nowhere and get imitated by Tina Fey?

I don't know what this lack of engagement with ideas that don't challenge our own will do to us in the end. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps it's the same sort of insulation that's occurred throughout human history but now the means are different. All I know is that I feel sort of bad about hiding from the nice people trying to deliver a pamphlet to me about the end of the world.