My latest column for OSV News was meant to look at the “trends to watch out for in 2025,” but all of my listing and researching got red-lined once I heard a co-worker, remarking on the state of society and the church, “people need to be reminded that ‘you are not being asked to be anything other than human…'”
We’re a society that is increasingly detached from one another. We work and play behind screens, often from home, surrounded by no one; we shop online rather than go out among people, forgetting that we remember our humanity (and how to BE humane to each other) by being around people. It’s done something terrible to us. We see it in how awful behavior has become on airplanes and subways — wherever humans are corralled together but have forgotten how to co-exist with each other in enclosed spaces.
But, “You are not being asked to be anything other than human.” The phrase turned my whole column into pondering just how inhuman are all of our trending behaviors:
…the story of Luigi Mangione, the Baltimore native’s murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson and the ensuing hero worship, of him — demonstrated by the “holy” candles, card games, T-shirts and more being snatched up by admirers who probably think themselves opposed to capitalism but still need to display the season’s assassination chic.
There are enough tentacles reaching out from this Kraken of a story to concern anyone capable of reason, but the most troubling is the recent poll out of Emerson University showing that 41 percent of voters aged 18-29 find Mangione’s cold-blooded action an acceptable means to an end.
Perhaps too many modern children, raised on “Assassin’s Creed,” were denied access to the fairy tales and fables of old, which for generations gently honed our abilities to see “here be monsters,” and “be careful what you wish for,” in the social maps.
The assassination swagger of elite vigilantism is just one trend we must watch out for and resist in 2025, along with these others, some of which it connects to:
— Increased social fragmentation and isolation;
— Increasingly closed (and echo-chamber enclosed) human minds;
— Worldwide government and economic instabilities;
— Continued neglect of a growing mental health crisis;
— Artificial Intelligence’s influence for better and much worse;
— The growing obliviousness to God working in our world;
— The weird collective yawning over society’s utterly confused, endlessly debased use of sexualities, sexual movements and just plain sex to fill voids and find meaning.When a 23-year-old girl can monetize her decision to dehumanize herself and 100 men during an empty, loveless, joyless 24-hour sex-fest, only to later announce (to the shrugs of many) her ambition to try it again, only with 1,000 men, then what is there to say but that we are living in an age of irreligious and existential benumbed ennui, one that is sinking the world into a muck of diabolical disorientation from which it may not be able to rescue itself.
But you don’t need to read about that, here — you’re reading about it everywhere else. Instead, let’s bathe in some incoming tides that portend something positive — something we can thrill-ride with a bit of hope.
If you’re intrigued, you can read about all the hopeful things, here.
Illustration via Pixabay.com
