THE APOCALYPSE

I'm sure this happens all the time throughout history, but I'm beginning to fear that the end of the world as we know it is approaching.

I just read a cute little book called Life As We Knew It. I thought it was a cool science-fiction book about the moon crashing into the Earth, but it turned out to be more about how life would be if a natural catastrophe wiped out a good percent of the population. The book is told in the voice of a preteen girl's diary. It was pretty girly and all, but it did show the lasting effects of contaminated water, unpredictable weather patterns, no electricity, mass hysteria and general human survival instincts. Not a fantastic book, but pretty good. When I was done with it, I realized it had a lot in common with The Road, a book I blogged about previously. Although, The Road is bleak and relentless and told so well that you feel as if it has already happened. Both books feature a natural disaster wiping out most of civilization and electricity and any sort of public works or police force. It's harrowing.

Next, I rented The Mist, based on a Stephen King story. Good story, good movie. Basically it was a typical horror film, but it supposed the concept of being trapped in a supermarket with no help from the outside. What do you do? How do you survive? It seemed like a similar theme from the book I had just read, so I went out and re-read The Road. It's still a powerfully depressing read.

I was then reminded of another book I read this year, called The World Without Us. This is a nonfiction book that basically shows how nature will take over if humans were to simply vanish. It cites places where this has happened and extrapolates. For example, without the teams of people working underground constantly, Manhattan would be flooded within a week. You really get the feeling that the Earth is letting us stay on her, but we're really starting to push it. It goes on to describe the plastic-eating bacteria that evolve in certain situations. It really makes one feel small and insignificant, but it also gave me hope that we're not going to literally destroy the planet. Ourselves, maybe, but not the planet.

Then I watched An Inconvenient Truth. Holy crap, people. If half of what this film predicts is true, then we are screwed. This planet cannot sustain this many people, not to mention the way our population and our pollution has exploded in the last 50 years. People are making this out to be a political issue, but I certainly remember hearing about global warming back in the 80's in school, and I'm sure it's been taught before then. This is not a new problem, and it's only getting worse. Then, right after watching the movie, Long Island had a really bad heat wave for 3 days. Now, everybody gets heat waves and we always have, but it really reinforced the point.

But imagine we take care of pollution and the population boom. Politically, we're screwed. The Middle East issue has also been around for years and years, but it's not getting better. It's getting much much worse. We were warned in the 70s to stop using fossil fuels, but we didn't. There is a finite amount of this stuff and we're using it up faster than ever. People don't believe that we'll ever run out, but we will, and in our lifetimes. That's what scares me. Right now, we depend on our enemies for our survival. That's a horrible position to be in. We've stirred up a hornet's nest and we've got millions of religious extremists who want to die in the process of killing us, PLUS they're sitting on our oil.

Please explain to me in simple English why we're not doing everything in our power to get away from fossil fuels. They pollute, they finance the Middle East, and it's goddamn expensive. But you know, if you told people that unless we all stop driving cars the Earth is going to spin into the sun, you would have thousands of people (mostly Americans) driving to work every day and politicians saying it's not economically feasible to our economy to prevent the destruction of Earth.

There is also a ton of information out there about the year 2012. Apparently this year coincides with a bunch of ancient texts and calendars and they all point to a catastrophe or something. I don't believe in ancient prophecies or to-the-day doomsday predictions, but I do find myself looking at the world situation and thinking, "How can we survive this? How is possible that I will die an old man with my children living good lives?" More often I find myself imagining a world where the oil has run out and we've done nothing to take its place, effectively crippling civilization and throwing the world into a Mad Max scenario.

Then, sometimes, I say to myself, "No, we can do it, don't worry" and this wave of relief comes over me. Well, I'll guess we'll just have to wait and see.


Oh, and did you see the new iPhones? They're so cool.