It's the End of the World as We Know it (Keep Calm and Carry On)

It’s the End of the World as We Know It (Keep Calm and Carry On)

“The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel” – Horace Walpole

                In a recent letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a writer opined that, despite evidence to the contrary, the world DID indeed end on December 21, 2012 as the Mayans had predicted.  As proof, he went on to list all of the ills facing mankind, including global warming, food shortages, mass shootings, war in the Middle East, rising income equality etc. etc.

                I chortled, as I read his letter, not because any of his examples were of a light-hearted matter per se, but simple because that list of disasters, real or imagined, could have been written at the end of any year, in any age of Man. If all we see around us is impending doom, then perhaps all we want to do is actually hasten that end?  

At the dawning of the second millennium in the year 999 AD , it was documented that our agrarian forebears in Europe, who were convinced that world was coming to an end on the stroke of midnight, didn’t bother to plant crops for the coming spring in Y1K. The Earth, which apparently didn't keep its eye on the human calendar or sundial , failed to implode as confidentially predicted.  Unfortunately for many however, their world did indeed end the following year, since without crops to harvest, they simply starved to death.  With the hindsight of a thousand years we can smile at the irony of what proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So just why do people secretly wish that the end of the world would happen on their watch?  I have a number of unproven theories about these doomsday prophets and their fixation on the end times:   1. Narcissism (the world cannot possibly go on without ME) 2. Schadenfreude (a desire to delight in the impending misfortunes of all those happy rich successful people you secretly hate) 3. Religious dogma (my holy book says that it is going to happen – so mark the calendar!)   Scientific curiosity (how DID that asteroid impact kill all the Dinosaurs?)   4. Gullibility (I read it on the Internet, so it must be true – isn’t it?)  5. Justified Apathy (If the end of the world is coming, why get off of the couch and actually do something?)

Humankind has managed to get itself out of some jolly tough scrapes in the past, so why should the 2010’s be any different, I might ask?   Have we not clawed our way back up the cliff, fiscal or otherwise on many occasions?   Did we not square our shoulders, push our chests out and put our collective noses to the grindstone in order to solve intractable problems of the past?   Yes of course we did, so how can the end of the world be ever so (repeatedly) nigh? 

The answers, as I have suggested above, are varied and mostly vainglorious, however the modern day soothsayer has the advantage of a voracious media to help spread the apocalypse.  In the Middle Ages, it would be just the local loony wandering around the village announcing that the end times were at hand.  And when I lived in London, it was a tradition on a Sunday afternoon to go down to Speakers Corner in Hyde Park and listen to the assorted “prophets” describe the coming annihilation from their upturned milk crates. Now of course, nut jobs of every stripe have access to social media in order to convince the on-line populace that their worldly days are done.  Why bother to join a cult or march down the street with a sandwich board, when one can simple Tweet the details of the coming Armageddon (in 140 characters or less) from the comfort of one’s own bunker?

At the end of the day, those that see the end of the world in every rainstorm, territorial squabble, or face in the clouds, are doomed, like the Ancient Mariner, to wander around Cyber Space with a dead Albatross around their necks, making life miserable for the rest of us. I will leave you with this quote from a very perceptive man as to the nature of impending disaster. 

"I've suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened."
-Mark Twain

More from the Albion Bulldog soon. 

Instant Media

“It is only the dead who have seen the end of war”   Attributed to Plato

                Nowadays, it is not good enough that someone can contact you by phone, (regular, cell and smart) email, text, semaphore, carrier pigeon, and smoke signal; we now have the IM or Instant Message to deal with.    If you don’t respond to that urgent email in the required nano-second of time, then as sure as night follows day, you will be getting a super, double urgent IM flashing at the bottom of the screen.  “Are you there???” it asks, as though the IM sender doubts your very existence. Not responding to the IM immediately is the same as saying – Yes for all practical purposes I have ceased to exist. 

Of course, the IM does have its practical purposes, since you can share real time critiques and sarcastic witticisms about the presenter with fellow participants during online Webinars.   “Well DUH”, we IM spitefully as the meeting facilitator drones on, or “Really, THAT”s our business plan??” as the CEO attempts to rally the troops.  “LOLs” and “OMGs” fly through the air like cyber confetti in our vapid conversations, with people we rarely see, and marginally care less about.

 This brings me to what I like to call IM –Instant Media.  It’s pretty much the same concept as an Instant Message, in that it combines urgency, with mostly irrelevant and vacuous information. In the old timey days when the 6 O’clock News ruled the roost, broadcast time was limited, and therefore they reported only ACTUAL NEWS.   Yes kids, there was a time just after the last ice age, when we didn't have 24/7 news channels because well, we just didn't have enough of the stuff to fill them.  Now of course, we are lucky enough to have multiple news channels eager to let us know that the end is nigh. (Right after this break!)

When I was kid in the mid 1970’s, I recall reading a story in the Daily Telegraph, in which a sober foreign correspondent reported that there had been a massive earthquake in China and that 600,000 people (my italics) might be dead.  This turned out to be the 1976 Tangshan earthquake which caused the highest death toll of any 20^th century natural disaster.  Sadly, sans Twitter and the Internet, we were left to ponder on the capricious nature of life in the People’s Republic, based upon a few dry column inches, before moved to weightier matters like yesterdays soccer results.   The good people at the Telegraph , never so much as intimated that the world might be coming to an end ,or in fact editorialized at all about the deaths of over half million people.  It’s possible of course that the tabloids had a few more lurid stories about the tragedy, but I don’t remember reading them.

This brings us to the present state of affairs, when a snow storm is forecast on the East Coast or a “celebrity” stubs her big toe during a drunken night out at the Global Warming Ball in LA. All of a sudden, every TV news operation is being hurriedly mobilized to cover the impending disaster.   What were once minor weather inconveniences or mere celebrity gossip, are now being followed and analyzed in the same breathless tones that were once reserved for presidential assassinations and World Wars.  In fact, I would argue that Edward R. Murrow demonstrated a more measured tone when he was under fire as a war correspondent than any current-day “reporter” hysterically informing us about Lindsey Lohan’s most recent DUI, or Brittany Spears lack of underwear.

So when youngsters say to me plaintively “Things are so much worse today”, I can’t help but agree with the poor misguided urchins.   If I, like a good proportion of the population, absorbed (and believed) everything that I saw and heard on 24/7 news channels, Internet, Twitter, and the myriad other media, the only possible conclusion I could draw was that we are all going to Hell in a large handcart.   One of the advantages of age of course is that you have the perspective to know that it’s not true. In fact all of these “end time” scenarios have happened before and will undoubtedly happen again.  If everything is “Breaking News” then nothing is.  

Yes of course contemporary music is mostly horrible, and hopefully it will meet its own Rapture shortly; however most other things aren't so bad.  If you are old enough today, and many still are, you have lived through the Depression, World War II,  McCarthy, Segregation, Vietnam, Gas Shortages, Global Cooling, 70’s clothes styles and 80’s music, anyone of which might have toppled less hardy generations.  And the sun has continued to rise in the East.

Think how much interesting life would have been, had Instant Media been around when things were just a teensy bit more challenging.  Maybe  during the time of the Dark Ages,  Spanish Inquisition, or World War I say, or when The Plague,  Black Death  or Spanish influenza  were laying waste to large swathes of the world’s population, or perhaps more recently  with Hitler, Stalin and the Holocaust… For better ratings they might have convinced us that the world was coming to an end.   Just sayin’

More from the Albion Bulldog soon.