The End, Again

A column by Supervisor Alex Gromack

 

There must be something attractive about disasters. We seem to dream them up at the drop of every hat or at the end of every decade.

 

Maybe it has something to do with that whole Stone Hedge thing. We build these mysterious structures without leaving any directions. As a result historians and archeologists spend years trying to figure out exactly what these things were designed to do.

 

In the absence of any real information, someone, usually without any academic qualifications, inevitably links the structure to one ‘long ago and far away’ doomsday prediction that never materialized. 

 

We shake our heads, cluck our teeth and laugh aloud at the all the daffy disasters our ancestors dreamed up but are we so different?

 

Take for instance Y2K.

 

It was comeuppance day for the technocrats. At exactly one nano second after 12:00 midnight on December 31, 1999, the world would come to a screeching halt. According to the proponents, who almost seemed as if they couldn’t wait for the bad things to happen, the world was run by computers and these computers would freeze as the New Year burst onto the scene because they weren’t programmed to compute 2000.

 

We would starve to death as food delivery would be disrupted. Maximum security prisons would fail releasing the criminally insane on to our streets. Nuclear tipped missiles, interpreting the ‘glitch’ as a preemptive strike would launch them selves in retaliation. Communication would come to a screeching halt as phones lost their dial tones and worst of all TV remote controls would be inoperable.

 

 

 

Well Y2K came and went. There were a few minor problems. Some parking lot lights didn’t go on when they were expected and one credit card company mailed out duplicate bills.

 

Just when we thought we could go into the water again, the life guard blows the ‘out of the pool’ whistle.

 

It seems another disaster is on the horizon and this one is a biggie.

 

On December 21, 2012, less than a scant four years from now ‘our sun will rise in the middle of the Milky Way Galaxy causing an alignment between the earth, sun and the galactic center’ knocking earth out of its orbit and hurtling us into deep, dark lifeless space.

 

Something like that could have a really chilling effect on our 2012 holiday season.

 

Experts with PhD’s in ‘metaphysical musings’ to ‘ice cream sculpting’ to ‘leather tanning’ are all over the internet doing their best to make sure us common folks are aware of what is coming down the pike.

 

I only wish the authorities had let us know about this a little sooner.

 

I’ll bet they knew about it all along and used all this time to gather up supplies for themselves and their friends, secure and stock all the space shuttles they could find, pick the planet they want to colonize and are just waiting for blast off clearance from Houston.

 

Isn’t that always the way?