Apr 01, 2017
It seems like every time I log on to the Internet, I see new prophets of doom. Just the other day I saw a blurb that reported Stephen Hawking’s prediction that the human race only has about 1,000 years left on this earth. I tried to click away from that headline and saw something saying that at any moment a “Doomsday asteroid” is going to slam into the earth and end all life on our planet in 2036. But I think the one that bothered me the most was the one I read saying that “The end of the world will happen in the next SEVEN YEARS with a cataclysm of natural disasters.”
What does that even mean, “a cataclysm of natural disasters”? Is that something serious, like the combination of end of the production of any kind of wine and one of my kids asking me, “Why are you sooooo sensitive?” (I can feel the funnel cloud forming even after just writing those words). Is it akin to what would have happened if I weren’t successful when I put out a kitchen fire while keeping a three-year-old toddler from shoving my credit card into the fridge's ventilation grill as I pried an 18 month old’s head from the stair banister? Now those are what I call cataclysms of natural disasters (with the word “natural” being a relative term).
Life was so much easier back in the good ole days, the days before the World Wide Web and crawling texts. News programs came on once a day (maybe twice, if you consider the Today Show or Good Morning America news programs) around 6ish. There were no sub-texts alerting us that someone in England started frothing at the mouth after eating meat from a cow that tested positive for mad cow disease or that an earthquake may or may not have triggered a tsunami that may or may not totally wipe out the California coast line. Now, we are constantly bombarded with all kinds of disasters that are just moments away, like Dateline or Discovery Channel specials on how the worst earthquake in the history of earthquakes will hit California sometime between now and 2 bazillion years from now.
It’s exhausting living in this age of information. I never heard anything about Doomsday asteroids or cataclysms of natural disasters; I just knew I would have to “duck and cover” when the Russians finally decided to fire their nuclear weapons. Scientists predicted that through the use of a Doomsday Clock, which began ticking in 1947. I guess I was doomed to be a nervous wreck even before the day I was born.
