Death of the Human Race

Grim title, I know, but I've been pondering this for awhile. As a Swedish American, I'm good at pondering. I haven't been around for a few weeks, but it's been a busy summer, and I've found Facebook. Folks can look me up there. So, I thought I'd come back with a bang.

Reading a book right now, that is one of those that you start, don't really like, but by the time you figure out you don't like it, you're deep enough into it that you're comitted to finishing it. Book's called "Warday" by Whitley Striever and James Kunetka. Apparently they were big writers in the '70's and 80's. I've not read anything by them prior, though Striever wrote "The Hunger" and Kunetka wrote "Wolfen." Both made pretty good movies, so the authors must have some creds.

Anyway, the book is one of those apocolyptic genre novels where we're wiped out by our own stupidity and nukes. It was copywritten in '84, so it was written in 82 and 83 would be my guess. I picked it up as an antique. A reminder of a lost era. A reminder of my high school years when there were still two superpowers and we worried about annilation in the blink of an eye.

There was a whole slew of movies and books out with this theme around that time. Everything from "Red Dawn to "The Day After." I read some of the books in the "Doomsday Warrior" series. A lot of us were convinced at the time that we would go out with a bang, because Reagan's finger was on the button, and the old boy was senile even then.

In Warday, the US and Soviet Union exchange a limited nuke strike on Oct. 27, 1987. Chaos reigns and life as we know it ends. But by that time, the USSR was starting to fall apart. The satilite counties it had controlled for nearly fifty years were peeling off faster than a pole dancer trying to make her car payment. By the early 1990's, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics no longer existed. We backed down from the nuclear holocaust issue.

Not totally, but it's much less a threat than when I was in high scool; when this book was written.

So now, we have the zombie apocolypse to worry about. Out new genre of humans being snuffed out of existance is now in the slimy hands of a bunch of rotted corpses. We've got dozens of movies, some good, some not so good out there about zombies taking over society and those not converted to chow struggling to survive. I've written and published some of these stories as well. Got a whole series going right now. It's good fun for me, as it give you a lot of creative leeway to build a story. Mine, however, tend not to be as dark as a lot of them. When you've survived an era of realistically facing nuclear annihlation, a zombie hoard isn't much to worry about.

But this brings me around to our fatilistic mind. We as humans for whatever reason have it in our core to believe we'll go out in some great holocaust. Read Revelations in the Bible. If God's wrath isn't an apocolyps, I don't know what is. You can go back even futher, to Babylon. Read the Flood stories in there. Again, civilization is wiped away.

We believe we are going to be snuffed out. All at once. The planets aligned a few years ago, and we were supposed to be ripped apart by the gravity. We're supposed to be hit by a meteor. By plagues. The same things that killed the dinosaurs. Global warming, global cooling. We're supposed to die in some great catastrophy.

Here's the thing. We're not going to die until God says it's time. Whether individually, or as a race, we won't go until it's time. An generally, there's nothing we can do about it. We backed down from the nuclear bombs, but we can't control them all, and we can't control them personally. The lesson of all this is to live a good life, enjoy life while you have it, and don't get too attached to money. You'll go out with the same things you had when you came in. Nothing.

Now, all that being said, have a good day. I've got to get the kids up for school.