We get hard-shelled to some of it. Thirty thousand lives destroyed each year in car crashes, for instance. How many deaths come from nationally publicized gun violence? (a)Local gun violence, pretty low-level relative to car deaths, isn’t reported on nationally. (b) Splashy events do make network news; and for every such death, hundreds die in car crashes.
Where is the math in that? What are your odds of dying either way? 320 million people, life expectancy 75 years, over 4 million deaths annually==seven point five per thousand deaths are in car wrecks. Do you fear for your life on the highway?
The real answer, in my quiet opinion, is that because we no longer need a quiet refuge of faith to buoy us up in real hard times, he have no refuge of faith for those times when we do feel down. The cell phone, blessed wonderful device, and PC/MAC stations at home where we wallow in face-book (etc.) and “two million supermarkets can’t be wrong” sites like this one (smiley) separate us from the interpersonal web of support that people used to enjoy.
Three generations ago families interacted in the evening; then radio and later TV came along and we rolled down a marvelous slippery slope, away from each other and into the arms of the electron.
Electrifying isn’t elevating.
For wholly other reasons I believe that GOD created this universe and gives it all the purpose we need. If you’re on-your-own here, then yes modern life is loaded with burdens and vacant of the interrelationships that help us endure them.
Fun? “Either illegal, fattening, or immoral.” I sense it’s the immoral part that gets to most of us; sex is of the body, not the heart. Finding a life partner who is above all a confidant and friend, good for conversation at all times of day or night, someone to whom and for whom we are willing to make great sacrifices, THAT is the blessing we need as human to human. Wife, buddy, boss, child, all of the above. We need to be in relation. GOD puts us there.
Oh, and Another Thing 