Enough with the doom and gloom
The Guelph Mercury, 3/4/2009
Who are these people?
If you sat in Kitchener’s city council chambers on a particularly gloomy night last week, you couldn’t help but wonder.
They crowded into the room to hear the gospel of a man who thinks their world stinks, and it’s only getting worse. In a nutshell, they were told: expect more wars, widespread starvation, deeper recession, greater brutality, drowning cities and increased run-of-the-mill human suffering.
They were told that AIDS and tuberculosis might merge to form an even deadlier virus. And that the Russian mob could sell a nuclear bomb at any moment to any number of terrorist groups that want to wipe us out.
Dozens in the crowd listened intently, nodding at each turn.
The good news inside the chambers was all coming from Wilfrid Laurier University assistant professor Garry Potter, no relation to the mop-topped wizard Harry.
Garry Potter, dressed all in black with a long grey ponytail, was giving a public lecture focused on the dystopia theory. That’s the school of thought that sees the world as the opposite of utopia — a living nightmare characterized by misery and more misery.
In academics, believing that can make you a professor. In the rest of the world, you’re just a Debbie Downer.
With a theatrically dark delivery, he told the audience everything is going to get worse and that they are planning for a future that will never come.
Uh-huh.
After a story ran on his sunny lecture, the emails poured in. One firefighter wrote that Potter should’ve been tossed out of the building. Another was upset the professor would get any press coverage at all.
Potter’s not the first academic to play Dr. Doom.
Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, was ridiculed after he predicted in 2006 that a massive economic crisis was brewing.
Imagine that.
But Potter’s predictions are so widespread, describing meltdowns across so many fields, that if they’re proven true, I don’t want to be a part of that world.
The point here isn’t to make fun of Potter’s gloomy crystal-ball gazing.
He’s correct to point out there are a lot of terrible things happening on our planet, and a lot of people doing bad things to each other. He’s correct to say many of us don’t seem to care.
But there’s also a lot of good out there, too, and Potter seems to deliberately ignore that.
If the point of all this, as he says, is to encourage the public to get off their couches and do something about the problems in their world, wouldn’t you have more success motivating people by giving them hope than by trying to depress them?
Potter would say that’s Pollyannish, sticking your head in the sand. Plenty of us disagree.
If you follow Potter’s line of thinking, why try at all?
Yes, we are in a recession that has caused hard times for many — the feeling that everything is falling apart, and not knowing what’s around the corner.
I, along with plenty of others who have recently been handed layoff notices, know that feeling well.
But time rolls on.
Lately, there have even been glimmers of hope that this recession will turn around sooner than expected.
It turns out there’s more to life on this planet than our jobs, our career arcs, and our paycheques.
Most of us already know that.
Others need reminding.
No comments yet.
Leave a comment
No trackbacks yet.