Peggy Noonan, writing for The Wall Street Journal, comments on a scene in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. The movie is about the Battle of the Bakara Market in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993. In this particular scene, the actor Tom Sizemore, in the role of a hard-bitten, hard-core U.S. Army Ranger colonel, is in command of a small convoy of Humvees trying to get back to base with mortar and rocket fire exploding all round. In this violent vortex, the colonel guy stops the convoy, brings some wounded on board, throws a dead driver out of the driver's seat and yells at a bleeding sergeant who's standing in shock nearby:  

Colonel: Get into that truck and drive.

            Sergeant: But I'm shot, Colonel.

Colonel: Everybody's shot, get in and drive. 

The words, “Everybody’s shot,” struck Noonan. They suggest a metaphor for life. Everyone has taken a hit; everyone has been hurt. We are all walking wounded.

A statement by Henry Wordsworth Longfellow gives me pause. 

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

She goes on to cite the case of Rosie O'Donnell, who more often than not is likely to be referring again to the fact that she lost her mother when she was a child.  

"This of course is very sad, and Rosie has spoken of its sadness very often, and with a great whoosh of self-regard. Her sympathy for her loss made me think the other day: She doesn't really know that other people lost their mothers when they were young. She doesn't really know that some people never even had mothers. She doesn't know everybody's been shot." 

The apostle Paul affirms the same truth. Everyone suffers, but, he adds, the sufferings "of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us" (8:18). He even argues that inanimate creation "groans," waiting that day of future redemption.

For Norman Sleep, a professor of geophysics at Stanford, who has presented his theory to the American Geophysical Union, the travail of creation is very real. The Stanford University scientist says that the Earth may have been repeatedly pummeled by asteroids between 3.5 and 4.5 billion years ago, snuffing out all early life. He argues that there may have been long periods during which life repeatedly spread across the globe, only to be nearly annihilated by the impact of large asteroids.

Just when your life-form is beginning to make some progress -- BAM! -- an asteroid knocks you back to the first chapter of Genesis.

The early Earth, Sleep says, may have been "an interrupted Eden" -- a planet where life repeatedly evolved and diversified, only to be sent back to square one by asteroids 10 or 20 times wider than the one that hastened the dinosaurs' demise. When the surface of the Earth finally became inhabitable again, thousands of years after each asteroid impact, the survivors would have emerged from their hiding places and spread across the planet --- until another asteroid struck and the whole cycle was repeated.

Bummer.

It is just a theory, granted. Nevertheless, it is a reminder that it is tough to live a meaningful life when you are shot, or when you live in an interrupted Eden -- that is, a place where you know that at any time a catastrophic event might knock you back to square one.