The ill-fated knol project has ended, but I wanted to preserve my lone contribution to the project. This was that.

Bu`bon´ics    (bũ`bǒn´ĭks)

v.

1. The act of prompting a cathartic release normally the result of taking a proactive action achieved as a simple result of thinking about taking that action.

The human condition persists, at least in part, on the strength of our evolved capacity to ignore the very worst of our shared failures, atrocities and oversights.  This subconscious aversion to confrontation manifests in remarkable ways, not the least of which is our ability to abstract emotional engagement with horror from both factual analysis and intervention, action, reaction or prevention.  This is bubonics.

Bubonics often a utility of pure necessity in mitigating the vast amount of emotional events emerging in the world around our species.  It is neither practical nor possible to directly engage on an individual or communal level to more than a tiny fraction of the events in our environment.  As such, a bubonic detachment allows the modern person to emotionally engage with events, perhaps such as the ongoing tragedies in Darfur, South Africa or the Congo–to empathize and sympathize with the story as a whole, while abstracting away any personal connection to the people or places.

As a instrument of abstraction, bubonic emotion affords the 22nd century self the ability to assert caring at the molecular level while maintaining knowledge, insight and relevance at merely the blurb level.