An Apocalypse of our Own Making

On February 29 the doomsayers, still smarting from the Y2K fizzle, came out and started crying that all our computers would go plotz. What happened? A computer in Armpit, Arkansas went phlooey and displayed the date wrong, that's it that's all.

This got me to thinking how our view of the apocalypse has changed throughout the ages.

At first our idea of the Apocalypse was fueled by the Bible. You know the Four Horseman, Jesus coming back (and boy is he pissed), the dead rising from the grave, the whole spiel you can get nightly on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Then World War 2 happened, The Atomic bomb being dropped on Japan seemed to pose the question in collective consciousness, "Could we cause the Apocalypse ourselves?" The answer was no, but our collective governments labored to change that answer over the next forty years. The end result is we had in our shaky hands not only the power to blow up the planet but to do it over and over again twenty plus times.

After the Cold War ended and we settled down to our false sense of security, we started looking around for other apocalypses. AIDS and other nasty diseases filled the bill for while and terrorism also was around for a few worries.

Now that the millennium has started (not really) We are casting about for the next apocalypse. We seem to be casting our eyes to the computer and the internet. I feel the reason for this is two fold. 1) the technology is new to us and lot of us scared at anything new in our fragile sheltered lives, 2) computers are understood as being very powerful toys with a lot of power over us. As more and more of us understand computers, this paranoia will die down.

The question is what will be our next apocalypse? I don't know but I have a few candidates. Disease, there are plenty of nasty bugs out there and with us cutting into new previously uninhabited areas of the world, Lord knows what we will find. The Paramilitary Threat, there are a lot of unhappy campers out there and way too many know a lot abut bombs and guns. The Atomic Theat, there are a lot of those fiendish thingies out there and who knows what hands they may fall into. And lastly the biggie, Intolerance and Ignorance, Never under estimate the human capacity for cruelty and stupidity.