Isn’t it kind of weird to know that there are so many variables in the world we can’t really, with absolute certainty, say will turn out OK? Most of our lives our spent in an idle headspace. We get up in the morning, do a few things and then go to bed at night. But we never expect that BIG THING everyone’s always talking about to just come to a head.
Think about all the disasters that already line the annals of human history: Pompeii, Katrina, the Inquisitions, World Wars; where will it end?!
Usually people seem to be pretty good at tuning out the doomsday warnings spewing from fair and balanced news stations everyday. There’s a chance they’re on to something though.
At any time the next mega-catastrophe could strike and there would be nothing we could do about it. Nothing! As individuals, our opinions are not enough to direct actual societal change, potentially saving us from these atrocities. We will, however, feel the full amount of suffering when they come to fruition.
Imagine for a minute that cell phones, a more-than-ubiquitous technology, cause incurable deformities in people who use them for periods of longer than 30 years. Well, I guess we’ll find about about that in a few decades, am I right?
Climate change: There’s a doozy of a topic. Two or three scientists are still convinced we have nothing to worry about. Still, if those brilliant minds for some reason fail us, the consequences will be unimaginable. Entire cities will be destroyed, starvation will sweep the globe, species will disappear by the day, all because we believe more in progress than keeping things relatively clean. Let me tell you, it’s going to be a hellish nightmare if we guess wrong on that one.
Speaking of hellish, just consider how terrible it will be if god ends up being real. God: If it exists in the popular form of angry man in the clouds, we’ll be totally fucked. Nobody actually does all that stuff they say is so crucial in the Bible. Unless we sacrifice the first-born goat of the virgin bovine on the tenth full moon of the new millennia, of course.
Okay maybe I’m being a bit too grand with this. Things don’t need to get out of control in a macro fashion to go horribly wrong. There are infinite things that could ruin your life this second, or this second, or this second or this one.
All that fast food you’ve been eating lately, don’t be surprised when it turns around and gives you a heart attack.
Car accidents happen by the thousand every day. And every year thousands of people in the U.S. die from them. Sad, extremely sad, but you could very easily be next.
You just didn’t listen when people told you not to smoke, did you? Well, even things that can easily be avoided by simply doing nothing can in fact come around to take your life at any given time.
Hell, a rock could clock you on the head tomorrow and you wouldn’t even know it because you would be dead the instant it made contact with your skull.
And the craziest thing about all of this is no matter how much can go wrong, despite all the warnings from environmentalists, church leaders and experts of all fields of gruesome death, pretty much nobody will do anything to counteract the possibilities mother chance has set out to decide fate for them.
Somehow we just disregard all these imminent warnings, these avoidable health risks, and keep on truckin’. Yeah! Everything is fuckin’ fine as fuck right now, so why be a worrywart? The party’s just getting started down here on this Earth planet—where nothing exists if it doesn’t hurt this second.
Global warming, the wrath of God, those are all things of the future. We don’t need to think about the future. At all. Ever. Just think about what’s happening now, and now, and now and now.
And because of that, I say “Go you, America.” Don’t let pesky facts or statistics get you down. We’re bigger than that.
This column has been brought to you by corporate sponsors Monsanto and Exxon Mobil. For any resources about how we are doing our part to change the planet, don’t look on the Internet. A lot of that stuff is just bad and false. Just know that we promise we are doing our part. God bless W. If you really need to ask something, email our pawn, erhm, associate, Andy at holsteen@wisc.edu.