The people in the United States, as well as many other nations around the world, find themselves living in a disaster culture with its traumatic effects functioning largely below the level of consciousness. There is a ubiquitous foreboding of the human-initiated random violence that saturates commercial media coverage of world events. There is a rising trepidation among significant social strata about the impacts of extreme weather events, whether recognized as early warnings of more dire environmental changes arising from accelerating climate change or merely the frequency and intensity of these phenomena in an increasingly overpopulated world. Paranoia appears widespread over the safety of children despite statistical evidence of an overall decline of violence against children in particular and a decrease of violent crimes in general. An underlying disease also circulates about personal pollution from toxins, superbugs, and epidemics, most readily represented by the popularity of movies and television series devoted to zombies, contagious diseases, epidemics, and alien invasions. At the same time, there is a subterranean yearning for an apocalyptic event that will upend this world and serve as a harbinger for something new and different requiring and enabling heroism and tenacious survivability that generates individual meaning after living lives of “quiet desperation.”