FERGUSON: Stop the world, I want to get off

Have you ever been with a group of people and suddenly realized that something was about to happen that you didn't feel comfortable with? Things like that used to happen more often when I was younger and had more spare time and less control over who I socialized with.

Maybe I'd be at a party and someone would produce some illegal substance and suggest everyone partake. Or maybe I'd be hanging out with some neighborhood kids and some troublemaker would want to engage in an act of vandalism or some other type of pointless, destructive activity. Things like that would make me feel uncomfortable and give me the urge to get away from the situation as quickly as possible. "This is not who I am," I would think to myself, "and I don't want to be part of a group that thinks this is acceptable."

That sort of thing doesn't happen to me much these days. I don't go to many parties or hang out with random people who happen to live near me. What socializing I do now is usually with people who share my values and who don't surprise me with suggestions of illegal or otherwise ill-advised behavior.

But I have to admit that I've been getting a similar "I don't want to be a part of this group" feeling lately, but on a much wider scale. There are things going on in our world, and in our country, that have made me feel like the human race in general is a group I'm feeling less and less comfortable being a part of.

The most obvious reason is the situation with ISIS. There now exists in our world an actual country run by avowed terrorists. These are people who proudly and publicly murder anyone who crosses their path that doesn't agree with their religious and political beliefs, and they have their own country now. And the rest of the world is allowing this to happen. It's hard to fathom why the entire civilized world has not united to condemn this atrocity (even countries that don't always get along like the U.S., Russia and China) and combined forces to wipe this "caliphate" from the face of the earth.

When you dig into the situation you find that it's a complicated mess with different factions being supported by different traditional allies and all sorts of competing political agendas that cloud the situation. That is making it difficult if not impossible to unite all the disparate players into a functional alliance. But that knowledge does nothing to mitigate the fact that the world is allowing a nation of terrorists to exist, and has tolerated it for some time now.

There are things going on closer to home that make me feel further alienated from the rest of my species. We have a man leading the polls in a primary for our highest political office that routinely tells brazen, mean-spirited untruths and never apologizes. But Donald Trump's appeal makes sense in the current political environment, because mean-spiritedness is the attitude people seem to relish these days.

People on opposite ends of the political spectrum consider the other side to be the enemy. I can't begin to count the number of times I've heard people say that they "hate" President Obama. I recall left wingers using similar terms for our last Republican president as well. We are increasingly becoming a "nation divided against itself," and you know what President Lincoln said that would lead to.

I don't like this environment, and I'm increasingly getting the feeling that whatever human society is evolving into is something I don't feel good about being a part of. I'm beginning to appreciate the urge some people feel to choose the life of a hermit that prefers the company of beasts of the field to his own kind. I wonder what the market for a cabin out in the middle of nowhere is like these days.

Bill Ferguson is a resident of Warner Robins. Readers can write him at fergcolumn@hotmail.com.

This story was originally published December 5, 2015 at 9:13 PM with the headline "FERGUSON: Stop the world, I want to get off ."