Has anybody else been disappointed that the looming apocalypse has not yet materialized? Between Y2K, Bird Flu, SARS, acid rain, depletion of the ozone layer, two headed frogs, global warming, and a hundred other scenarios, I would have thought the world would have imploded, exploded, or otherwise gloriously disintegrated by this point. I'm getting a little tired of apathetic doomsday scenarios, if you are going to say the world is going to end for whatever reason, it would be nice if you were actually right. Two fairy tales come to mind: Chicken Little (who thought the sky was actually falling) and the Boy Who Cried Wolf (and got eaten when a real wolf showed up). The Emperor's New Clothes wouldn't be out of place here either, but where's the kid to holler that the Emperor is naked? All we have is scientists and activists and alarmists nodding gravely and pointing fingers about who is to blame, with no one saying that the last 374 predictions have all come to naught, why should we believe the latest one?
My favorite example involves whales. Exhibit A is Star Trek IV (yes, that cheesy '80's movie). Exhibit B is two trips on an east coast whale watching cruise roughly 10 years apart. So we have 1987, 2007, and 2017 represented along with Humpback Whales, what could be better? In the movie (my favorite) aliens from the future are inadvertently destroying the planet because the extinct whales won't return their calls and Kirk and crew must go back to 1987 and bring back a whale to 'tell the probe what to go do with itself.' My two whale watches both involved an onboard naturalist (a college intern majoring in some -ology) who on the first trip assured us that midwestern crop farmers were responsible for the despicable shape of the oceans, while on the trip a decade later it was actually lobster fishermen who were responsible for most cetacean-type woes. At least Star Trek blamed it on some actual whalers. So there you have it, three theories on why the whales, and probably everything else is going to die; personally I prefer the Star Trek version, at least the movie had plenty of funny parts. These modern doom and gloom prognosticators have no sense of humor whatsoever.
It was also a little annoying to be spoken to like a small, clueless child by someone in their sophomore year of college. I simply asked after the birds they were likely to see on such an outing (being an avid birder and a landlubber) and was told that yesterday they had seen a Manx Shearwater feeding near the whales and it was beautiful (all in a tone that implied that obviously I could in no way appreciate such aesthetics and couldn't tell an albatross from an ostrich) but on this trip there really wasn't much to see save an occasional Wilson's Storm-petrel so I'd best go sit in the galley and drink overpriced cocoa. But I was pretty sure I had seen something but had to wait to discover what until I got home and could download my pictures and there it was, a Great Shearwater; she was wrong about the birds, maybe, just maybe the lobster theory was flawed as well. But then sophomore means, 'foolish wisdom' and I remember from my own sophomore days that I really felt like I knew everything, but a year later I suddenly began to realize how much I didn't know. I was just as confident in my ignorance as she was, but thankfully life has taught me a few (painful) lessons since. Just like this gal is so sure of the evils of lobster fishing and the behavior of pelagic birds, so too are 'the experts' who tell us the world is going to blow up or wither away in the next decade or two in some creative way or another.
That is not news, we all know the world is going to end; no matter who you are or where you are from, we all know that things cannot last forever as we know them. All stories end, everyone dies, and so too will the tale of the universe one day come to an end. It's fine to develop theories and prepare, if you can, for doomsday or try and save some species from extinction, what isn't good is telling everyone that you are certain sure everything will end tomorrow or a decade from now via this means and then it doesn't happen and then you do it again and again with some other trigger or cause now the greatest threat to existence we have ever seen. Today it's lobsters, tomorrow it's corn, next week it will be singing off key...world without end (that's irony!).
Forget about the means for a bit and focus on the end. What will you do on the world's last night? Be it the end of the world or the end of your own life? That's a far more important question. For the whale lady, everything will just go down into darkness, the forgetfulness of death and the great infinite nothingness. But there are other theories. This isn't a new question, the disciples were pestering Jesus about it 2000 years ago and I'm sure people were pondering it long before that. The question is, is the End really the End of Everything, or is it just the curtain falling on the first act of some far grander tale? Personally, I think the whale lady's theory is just depressing and saps life of all its purpose and interest, but if this flawed reality is just the warm up for something far better, no wonder we're anxious to know how it ends and what comes after! We spend so much time predicting and arguing about the means but no one seems to care what happens at the End, which is really a far more important question.
No comments:
Post a Comment