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Armageddon All Over Again Posting Date: Jul 15 2007 9:48PM Global warming scares the runny bejesus out of me. My only comfort – and a hollow one it is – is that I’m likely to be dead by the time the consequences of this phenomenon are at their most dire. When human civilization is crowding around the last puddle of fresh water like parched impalas on the savanna, I hope to be blowing in a dusty zephyr instead of gasping among the thirsty throngs.
The first time I can recall being this palpably scared that end of the world was nigh, I was in kindergarten and the killer bees were coming. Those Brazilian killers were headed my way, moving inexorably farther north every year. Hollywood even confirmed the danger in 1978 when The Swarm hit movie theatres. If Michael Caine, Fred MacMurrary, Olivia de Havilland, and Henry freaking Fonda couldn’t escape the bees, how could I?
I didn’t stop obsessing about the killer bees until I got freaked out by nuclear war. That time, no less of an authority than Steve Guttenberg ratified my fears when he starred in the 1983 television doomsday classic The Day After. Nuclear winter seemed just a season or two away so I drew concentric circles on a map, comparing them to the blast radius for the Soviet warheads I expected to drop on the steel mills in my hometown. It was good news – I lived in the vaporization zone.
Then there was the oil shortage. I learned about this one in geography class, so I knew it was absolutely true. According to my teacher, the global oil reserves held less than a dozen years’ worth of oil. Before I turned thirty, the teacher assured me, we would be back to horse drawn carriages and peat fires.
Then there were the social Armageddon years – when I felt like the world was ending because Karen Choppick hooked up with Stan Jankus instead of me. And Karen wasn’t the only one. There was a steady string of cute high school girls who seemed to prefer taller, older, less pimply guys to me. If ever there was a sign of the apocalypse, it was my dating record from the mid-80’s.
Just when I snapped out of that rut, everyone stopped having sex because of AIDS. The history books will say that in the years before I became sexually active, there was free love. In the years of my adult maturity, there was sex – as long as it was safe – in every darkened dorm room. During my peak years, however, we lived in fear of the invisible, but lethal venereal plague.
Then, there was Y2K and the mysteriously all-powerful Millennium Bug.
Well, it turned out that every computer system in the world except for the ancient Commodore 64 in my old public school’s library was ready to handle the chaos of the switch from 1999 to 2000. The killer bees also never quite got past the warmth of Southern California. The Soviets soon turned back into Russians and decided that instead of aiming their nuclear warheads at me, they would sell them on the black market to rogue nations around the world, so that was comforting.
I did eventually get taller, older and clearer of skin and the girls started liking me back. That evolution, combined with the knowledge that, as serious as AIDS is, you can’t get it from necking in the back seat of a Mazda, meant that I started to get a little action.
And, guess what? More than two decades later, we still have plenty of oil. In fact, if anything, we have too much. Albertans and Saudis bathe in it. It’s cheaper than bottled water and more readily available than light beer. We extract it, process it and consume it at record levels.
Of course, that’s just accelerating the pace of global warming, which makes winters here milder and milder, and we all know what that means … a few more warm winters and here come the damn killer bees!
You can just rock me to sleep tonight. |
