scatmonkey

This morning I was downstairs making coffee when the alarm clock went off again. Guess we forgot to turn it off when we got up.

I started thinking about how there are alarms on everything. There's an alarm to get up, one on one's car, one on one's home, an alarm for a possible fire, for the detection of elevated levels of CO2, when your cell phone's batteries are running low, and so on and so on.

I got to thinking, we live in a constant state of alarm. Americans possibly more so as they have a nice colour coded chart to inform them how alarmed they should be, but everyone else too.

A fire truck or an ambulance racing down the road, lights blazing, alarm sounding doesn't raise the level of attention, but simple someone's ire.

No one pulls over. No one moves. No one cares. It's just another alarm.

I read a report in Time or something about some test that was conducted to see how quickly children react to a fire alarm in a family's home. Very few even woke up.

Why should they? Everyday alarms are the background sonata to their daily lives.

Alarms everywhere. Alarms for everything. Listen carefully; can you hear one right now?

Me too.

No wonder everyone's so tense.

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Song of the moment: "Mondo'77" - Looper