5 Minutes To Midnight

(Originally posted 3-8-2009)

I would like a definitive answer: Is the end near?

The end of the world is not something I think about often (only about as often as I write a somewhat intelligent livejournal entry) and yet for the past few months I feel like it keeps coming up in my chosen movies and books.

It starts with me reading "Watchmen" which happened in December (and would have happened way sooner if I hadn't been so slow to find it). Yes, it made me think but to be honest, I didn't let it get to me. Probably because it was 5AM and I had just spend the last 4 hours reading until my eyes were red and I needed sleep.

Next, I saw "Dr. Strangelove." It's a fantastic movie, sure and yet, I watched it with the mentality of, "It's about the Cold War. We don't have problems with Russia anymore. Nothing to worry about." Yes, but don't we had troubles with other people? I can be really smart sometimes.

Now today I have spent a lot of time reflecting on Doomsday as I went to see "Watchmen" and watched "Religulous." One was good and one was very annoying (take a wild guess). I already mentioned "Watchmen" above. With "Religulous" I was not expecting mentions of the end of the world even though I should have been since apparently the big three religions believe the end of the world is near. This prompted me to look at what time it is on the Doomsday Clock.

In the history of the Doomsday Clock, 5 minutes to midnight is on the more dire end of the spectrum (it only being below 5 during the 80s and the early 50s) but not as bad as it has been before. In 1953, the clock was at its lowest at 2 minutes to midnight because the US and the Soviet Union were testing nuclear weapons within nine months of each other.

Anedote time: One day, probably two years ago (my time perception can be bad. . . ironically) my mom and I were watching "The Daily Show" as we often do when we are in the same place. My mom even once called me right at the commercial of "The Daily Show" (when we were miles away from each other) because she had something important to tell me and knew I'd probably be watching it.

Anyway, on this episode John Stewart was interviewing Al Gore to talk about "An Inconvenient Truth". During a commercial my mom stood up to wash off a dish saying to me, "You know, I don't know how much I can worry about stuff like that [meaning global warming]. When I was in school they told us that when we grew up we wouldn't be able to breathe properly because of the toxins and pollution."

My mom makes a good point. Why should the world end now when people have been making accusations about doomsday probably since man has been thinking about the concept?

Then again, if the Mayans are to be believed, we've only got three more years. This is one of the few times when a date has been given.

Then again again, in the 1800s there was a guy who predicted the second coming of Christ down to the day only to have everyone wait around all day to find no savior.

Here's where I make my bit on why it took me this long time think about these things enough that I needed to write them down: I was born in 1989, a month and two days before the Berlin Wall came down. How much nuclear fear do you think has been in my life?

The first time I saw something that made me genuinely fear and think about a world ending war happened on September 11, 2001 about a month before my 12th birthday, an age in which you are considered to have developed the highest forms of thinking. And all this fear was only to find that there would be no nuking, or even any more attacks on American soil and suddenly I can go about my life again because the war is so far away. Even when my best friend told us he had enlisted in the US Marine Corps. in 2006, he assured us that the job he was most likely to get would not require going to Iraq at all. So far he's only been to North Carolina, Virgina, and Guantanamo Bay with plans to go to Spain (to my jealousy).

Those of us born in the mid 80s to the mid 90s (speaking of course about those of us over the age of 12 who can therefore presumably form opinions on these things; I wonder what scientist determined that 12 was the age anyway), we have not lived in fear. We were either too young during the end of the Cold War to know what was going on in any capacity or we were born after it all happened, when everyone was happy, it was 17 minutes to midnight and the economy was amazing. Our parents understand as they went through the Cold War and the threat of communism that the Vietnam War tried so hard to fight. Our grandparents understand as the nukes were made and used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We, however, were born into technology without fear. We learned to use computers when we had just gotten the hang of using the toilet. We know there are weapons out there that can destroy the world with the push of a button and yet there is no arms race so we don't see the problem.

This is why a cold war is far scarier than a hot one for the United States. In a "hot" war we are never on our own soil so the only people who actively worry are those who are fighting or know people who are fighting. In a cold war, everyone is affected because an attack could occur in your hometown when you went to get a galleon of milk from the DB Mart.

And yet, someone around my age does not know cold war and has not seen a nuclear weapon used in their lifetime, unless you count North Korea's weapons that couldn't even make it to Japan, and no one but the Doomsday Clock seems to.

Are these reasons why we are so chill about the 5 minutes?

Should we be more worried?

The economy is where all our worry is now and those two things could somehow correlate.

When the world ends, will it be our fault or nature's?