<The world is very far removed from TEOTWAWKI. Just ask anyone who remembers the Cuban missile crisis. >
I remember it. Now THAT was scary.
All present problems combined amount to a hill of beans compared with the carnage and mayhem that was actually going on in the good old days, and trivial compared with what seemed likely, when Dr Strangelove became a cultural icon.
What problems do we have now? AIDs is trivial [outside Africa]. A decent famine in India would get the same number in a single year back in the day. Ukraine was starved en masse during Stalin's reign. Islamic Jihad, including suicide bombers in Israel and all other victims combined barely equals those killed in terrorist-sponsored commercial aircraft explosions. We need the Twin Towers to make the numbers.
Count the corpses from Mao, Stalin, WWII, WWI, Pol Pot, Japan's Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere, Israeli/Arab wars and terrorism [King David Hotel etc], various famines [albeit mostly politically inspired]. Compare sars with the 1914 flu epidemic [I hope I'm not tempting fate there]. Check out the financial and social carnage of 1929 and the Great Depression.
We have some unbalanced balance sheets in Japan, yawn. We've had a few financial glitches in Argentina, Brazil, Russia etc and the Asian Contagion. Yawn. There have been some serious bus crashes. Not many aircraft crashes in recent years though another space shuttle crashed. That's not really the Titanic. Compare the destruction of the Twin Towers with an afernoon of bombing in Vietnam from fleets of B52s, or Hiroshima being nuked, or Dresden burned, or The Blitz. Trivial. Tens of thousands of Americans and millions of locals died in Korea and Vietnam. A few hundred Americans and several thousand locals died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Maybe there's something really bad that I'm unaware of. TeoTwawki is going to have to really get up a head of steam. At the moment, the burgeoning economies of China and the USA are not indicating collapse any time soon.
Of course Yellowstone or Taupo calderas could let rip and make big news. Or bigger deal still, a decent sized meteor could make a big splash in the Pacific Ocean. That would change things for the worse. There's always something coming.
Mqurice |
