Driving home from work today, I was thinking about heat. Wondering why, what with all the vast cold in the galaxy, that heat from our planet doesn’t dissipate into space, killing us all. I don’t need your science nerd answer—I know why it doesn’t happen. I’m going somewhere with this.
I wasn’t paying much attention in the ‘70s, but in the ‘80s I was pretty aware of the USSR’s ability to kill most of us, and ruin Earth for everyone else. It made no sense for anyone to use their ridiculously destructive weapons, but no one ever seemed to suggest that no one would. We just hoped.
My favorite role-playing game then was Gamma World. Trying to eke out existence in a ruined quasi-sci-fi world where nobody knows what went wrong, that was.... Was it fun? It was not exactly fun, but captivating. Imagining that world was scary and creatively invigorating.
Our world-ending threats now are different, but no less creatively fertile. After the bomb is after the fact these days. Now our Gamma Terra would be based on ecological upheaval. Or pandemic. Or economic collapse. Some people even get worked up over rogue asteroid impact.
It seems like people my age have been under some extinction-level threat our whole lives. Surely constant threat of vague doom—that's got to affect you. Maybe this helps explain hopeless chic? People my age, we’ve never lived through optimistic zeitgeist. We’ve pretty much always been under one gun or another. The deformation of mind and spirit living under them has squashed us into some weird shapes. A joyless bacchanal.
I wouldn’t classify myself as the sort of dude who sits around thinking of the end of humanity. I don’t even really think it’s possible. It’s just... the '80s kid remains wide-eyed aware that things can get fantastically worse on short notice. And there's nothing we can do about it.
That might be one of my favorite “proofs” for the existence of a benign God. We have an infinity number of ways to die spectacularly, but instead we keep on living sort of normally. That seems unlikely without frequent intervention.
2 comments:
"It’s just... the '80s kid remains wide-eyed aware that things can get fantastically worse on short notice. And there's nothing we can do about it." Yes, yes, I so identify with this! (I'm skipping over the really hopeful bit at the end which I liked to hone in on the gloomy overtone that I was just thinking about last week.)
And this is why the Google library-digitization project scares me on a non-rational level. Because what will happen in that post-apocalyptic world when we lose all the power and the paper books are gone?? Granted, we'll probably have survival issues more immediately in hand, but the books...the books. It'll be the destruction of the Library at Alexandria all over again! But bigger and googlier.
What would be a healthier, more spiritually engaged perspective is if this realization made me appreciate rather than lament the beautiful impermanence of it all. Ah, to have the stoic resilience of Job (but without the actual suffering or boils).
-deandra
If it helps, Deandra, widespread literacy will probably be lost within one to two generations after the apocalypse. Give it 50 years, and the books will be useless too, except as mulch and kindling.
Speaking of books, skip to three past Job. Ecclesiastes is the blasted comfort for the '80s kids in all of us. =)
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