Apocalypse And You!
As humans, we have a fascination with significant numbers and cycles. Sometimes, the fascination borders on the morbid. And sometimes it careens right through the borders and goes bombing around in the wasteland beyond, risking catastrophe with every little gully and hill it encounters. In fact, that level of fascination almost tempts catastrophe, exactly like an off-roader taking the questionable paths, driving through the loose footing, seeing how close the tires can get to the edge of the cliff. And then there’s a mingling of thrill and disappointment when the catastrophe fails to materialize.
And this somewhat tortured analogy is one of the reasons I think we’re so focused on the ill-named Mayan Apocalypse. We’ve gone through thirteen years now of different significant dates, rollovers, and resets, and the made-for-Hollywood world-changing apocalypse has failed to come about time and again. A year and a half after the biggest, most obvious one, Americans witnessed live on TV what looked to be the start of a world-changing conflagration, kicked off on our own soil, in our biggest city.
And I think the American psyche, at least, collectively said, “Well, it’s late, but it’s here. This shit is on.” I remember expecting that every last Reservist would be in uniform by that following weekend, that we’d immediately go to a war footing, and so on. But as intense as it has been, it has not been nearly as intense as it could have been, as many expected it to be.
While it has obviously caused changes, and been rather apocalyptic in relatively small chunks, there’s a sort of pent-up… frustration, almost, that we’ve been denied the catastrophic upheaval that we were promised. No Y2K, no WWIII, no nuclear events, no zombie outbreak, no starbeast devouring worlds, or anything. I think you can feel both the anticipation and disappointment, bundled together in one.
The result, I think, is what you have today: public fascination and a sort of undercurrent of expectation that a long-defunct civilization knew something about the end of the world that we don’t, people only half-jokingly breathing a sigh of relief that we’re still here, and gun sales on the rise, in part, because of a fear of some kind of doomsday. For some reason this fascination with numbers and cyclical turnover supersedes common sense, and in fact becomes a sort of “common sense” of its own. People will “joke” about their Zombie Apocalypse Plan, but then defend it as a sensible approach to disaster planning, and while some elements of their plan might work that way, mostly it’s there to calm the nagging “what if,” that it all might come to pass the way it happens in movies and shows.
That’s my impression of it, anyway.
My hope is that the more of these events that we mostly sail on through, the less appealing this sort of strain of thinking will be. The more, maybe, that people will trust the scientists who are trying to warn us off the silly stuff like this, and focus on the important stuff. Because there are disaster threats, though not as photogenic necessarily as the ones Hollywood puts out there, and there are things we can do to avert them, and better weather them. Without losing our heads, without turning every home into a fortified armory, without making semi-random dates on the calendar the subject of news stories and TV specials and long-winded blog posts.
Mirrored from Bum Scoop.