Are we heading towards this end?
I’ve had a strange feeling lately. Not one that is really describeable, per se, but one that given its affects on me, is not a good omen. I don’t see the world as we know it improving much at all.
Now, we can all attribute that opinion to the economic malaise and global chaos that runs amok like the children in Lord of the Flies. It seems that humanity – with all the gadgets and whatchamacallits – is still trudging along to a beat out of the Neolithic Age.
We’ve all heard the voodoo that is upon us: 2012, the Mayan End of Times doomsday scenario playing out at a theatre near you. I’m not a paint-my-face, genuflect-to-the-old-stones zealot on this point, but, I take my prophesies fairly seriously. (More of a Nostradamus fan.)
So, we have some bad juju swirling around. Cat 5 hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, climatic strangeness, genocide and economic reordering are just the wine list on your Airbus A380 flight to world catastrophe. (Enjoy!)
7 Billion of us currently fight for limited resources, crowd each other out, engage in warfare to gain those new footholds for water, for oil, for food even. International cooperation is a dish best served with a AK-47 pointing to your head. (Mixing it up here is good.)
But getting back to my feeling, the reason for all the hub bub in my heart is intimately tied to my own inabilities to right the titanic levels of anxiety hitting the icy cold waters of current reality. While I try to remain focused on the task at hand, I wonder, “will this matter a lick once the heavens (or depths) swallow me? Who the heck will survive it all? Does Oprah have a mountain getaway? (Would she take me on as a court jester?)”
Letting this sort of thoughts creep into your psyche is costly. (Couch costly, like $250 per 50-minute hour expensive.) But it serves notice on my conscious to do whatever I plan on complete before whatever doom-n-gloom besets us takes place.
Build that contraption. Learn how to play Eric Clapton’s ‘Cocaine’ on the guitar. Write that great book. Make a trip to Kathmandu. Ask out that supermodel lively around your corner. (Ok, I don’t have one of those handy, but hell, I dream.)
While its seems the Earth will end very soon – the Andromeda galaxy will to collide with the Milky Way, curtains close on humanity in this current form and location – we might as well do whatever our carbon-based life form can conceive in the present. Societal forces be damned. Trying to fix the problem: bullox that notion.
If we have only a short left, might as well do the Lord of the Flies wig out before we kick off. Or as William Golding put it, “Which is better–to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?” Seems we are all ready doing more of the latter than the former.
