We are all going to die. Most of us will die miserably — it's in the nature of things. Hopefully none of us, infirm in body and mind, will die falling from an upper story of a nursing care home, pushed to our deaths by a disgruntled care worker. That three people did die in that fashion at one particular facility within a five-week span in 2014 highlights, among other things, the fantastic stress to which overworked, underpaid, inadequately trained caregivers are subject.
"The world order is crumbling!!" proclaims Weekly Playboy magazine — shocking nobody, one suspects. Who can have failed to notice? Random terrorism, random murder, war, refugees, suffering, more suffering — such is the news fare of late, a steady diet of which can numb you to the point where even double exclamation points lose their impact. The cynical response, by no means indefensible as the historical record stands, is: "World order? What world order?" Nothing can crumble that never existed.
Playboy's article is interesting all the same, because it looks beyond the present crumbling to a future "order" (let's agree to use the word for want of a better one) germinating beneath the chaos — and here, maybe, there really is something shocking, for the "new" order turns out to be a very old one, ancient even. It makes a very strange impression on a 21st-century reader steeped in limitless technological empowerment, borderless globalization — a careening, unstoppable rush into an unknown but irresistible future.