Not a real post, rather a small thought on the gloom that seems ubiquitous right now.
It’s easy enough to do considering the current economic crisis. Difficult times have always been fertile ground for the growth of apocolytpica. I’m also not the only one thinking about it, Fox News appears to have gone into full-blown imminent disaster mode since Barack Obama took office, The Jan. 26, 2009 issue of the New Yorker had a 9 page article on prospective end-times and the people among us who are their prophets. I’ve even started reading the blogs of some of these dystopians (here and here). I don’t agree with these people but reading their works is fascinating, much in the same way reading Revelations is.
I’m too much of an optimist to ever entertain thoughts of dystopia, of a world so fractured and destroyed that it’d be unrecognizable to you and me. But I do find reading about it educational. I don’t think the prognosticators will be right (they’ve never been in the past, western culture has been on the brink of destruction since at least the 1500s if you dig back far enough). That doesn’t mean we can ‘t learn anything from them though. It might not hurt to reduce your debt and have a small cache of food storage is a good idea too. Buying a gun and retiring to the wilderness? Not so much.
