Are you like me? Do you, every once in a while, pause, take a breath and ask yourself silently (or out loud if particularly frustrated): what in the hell is happening to the world?

I’m in one of those moods at this specific moment. I wonder where we’re going as a nation, as a people, as a planet. So little seems to be familiar to me now. Change is rampant, ongoing, incontrovertible. That’s a given. But so little seems to make sense now. I try to deal with it, mentally, as best I can. But every once in a while, like now, I feel like screaming: that’s it! Enough! My head is full! That’s all I can take!

Consider the following from today’s internet headlines:

A visiting professor at North Carolina State University says the solution to the problems faced by many blacks is the extermination of “white people off the face of the planet.”

Kamau Kambon, who taught Africana Studies at the Raleigh school last spring, told a panel at Howard University Law School Oct. 14 this action must be taken “because white people want to kill us,” the Carolina Journal reported.

Kambon, a Raleigh activist and bookstore owner, was addressing a panel on “Hurricane Katrina Media Coverage,” broadcast on C-SPAN.

Of course we all know you can’t be black and a racist at the same time. Or:

A Palestinian from the village of Dir-Nizam west of Ramallah was killed by IDF gunfire late Saturday.

IDF sources said that soldiers spotted two Palestinians as they placed a suspicious looking bag near the settlement of Neveh Tzuf (Halamish) and fired at them.

The second man was detained and in his interrogation he revealed that the bag contained a dummy bomb, but an inspection of it uncovered rocks.

Earlier, soldiers from the Haruv battalion staging a routine arrest of wanted Palestinian fugitives nabbed 10 kilograms of explosives in a West Bank village and then made a dramatic discovery.

“The wife of the one of the fugitives held her baby with two hands and held a bag with a hand grenade underneath its shirt to hide it from the soldiers,” said Lt.-Col. Arik Chen, commander of the battalion.

Okay, fine; the old “live baby hides the hand grenades” trick. Or:

New York City’s top disaster planner and fire department chief isn’t planning for another 9-11. He’s preparing for something far worse – nukes.

Chief Joseph Pfiefer, speaking to a panel of security experts this week, said a terror attack employing crude nuclear weapons or dirty bombs is a scenario the Fire Department of New York is currently training to address.

“It’s the training we do that’ll make the difference between who gets saved and who doesn’t get saved,” Pfeifer said.

Right. I look forward to nuclear devastation. Or this:

Edinburgh University in Scotland will begin banning Holy Bibles from its student halls of residence due to concern they are the source of discrimination against students of other faiths. The ban was a response to student association protests as well as an agenda to equally support all faiths, a university spokesman told the Times of London.

Or how about:

China will close its borders if it finds a single case of human-to-human transmission of bird flu there, a Hong Kong newspaper reported on Saturday, while a defiant Taiwan said it would copy a patented antiviral drug.

Is it wrong that I desire “simple” in my life? Or am I just so damned far out of touch that I should be lined up against a wall and shot? At this precise moment in time, I feel so very, very out of control. Helpless. Mired. You ever feel that way? Surrounded? Overwhelmed? Tell me.