The Fishbowl Principle

A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall (Bob Dylan) It is the crack of dawn, and the old man is throwing himself into his work with the energy of a man a fraction his age. His body is loosely draped in frayed clothes, his hair unkempt, skin burnt, and eyes ablaze. Muttering to himself, he attends to his task with feverish resolve, pausing only to shake his head from time to time in dismay. When passersby ask him what he is doing or, more typically, poke fun at him, he issues a series of bleak prognostications. The gist of what he has to say: The world is coming to an end, and he, accordingly, is taking precautions. How did the old man know of this impending threat? God told him. Would any of us have taken such a fool seriously? Today, if someone were to take such a stand, they would most likely be labeled psychotic, or at the very least, categorically ignored. As things turned out, however, the man was not crazy; he was righteous. Upon receiving the revelation that the world was in grave danger, he felt divinely compelled to preserve what he could. So he embarked upon his project, which was to build a gigantic structure that would serve as shelter from an imminent, cataclysmic storm. No, Noah was not crazy at all. As the Book of Genesis explains, God was disgusted with the wickedness and evil wrought by humanity and decided to cleanse Earth and start anew. Under God’s plan, Noah and his family were to be saved (along with delegates from the animal kingdom) as representative models, progenitors for the world to come. He was entrusted with the task of safeguarding not just his own life but also all life on the planet. Just how Noah knew it was necessary to build an escape vessel was of little interest to the spotted owls and ferrets that would eventually float with him to safety. The animals were safe and dry as the result of their steward’s efforts. But Noah’s soon-to-be-drowned contemporaries questioned the basis for his prophesy; they smugly viewed him as a lunatic, screaming at the gates of the asylum that the sky was falling on the most beautiful of days. So they did not heed Noah’s warning —and they paid the ultimate price. Who among us, knowing what we know now, would not have sought a berth on Noah’s Ark as refuge from the mass extinction outside? With the benefit of hindsight, we would all choose survival for ourselves. But imagine meeting a wild-eyed old man on a sunny day, with no clear indication of a storm on the horizon: would any of us have listened? When the waters around us are calm, we find it difficult to anticipate, let alone prepare, for an oncoming storm with the potential to undo everything we have built. The survivors of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia can tell us stories about what it means to be devastated by an event that comes without warning. But the survivors of the 2004 tsunami are not unique. There are countless others, such as the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (who, along with the various public safety officials, were cautioned—and, in fact, were admonished quite explicitly—regarding the oncoming threat to human life), who can also speak to what it means to suffer unexpected consequences from natural events (Warrick, 2006). The unhappy truth is that recorded human history is woven largely from the thread of unheeded warnings. Sometimes, though, our biggest threats have not been from nature or from the heavens. Sometimes we create our own storms. Sometimes our biggest threats have come from ourselves.