Doomsday's Not Going to Ruin MY Day

I received an email yesterday from a blogger buddy of mine. She was upset by something that had been circulating in the news and in the blogosphere: Doomsday: How BP Gulf Disaster May Have Triggered a World-killing Event, and she wanted me to weigh in on it.

In a nutshell, the story that ran on Helium.com makes a pretty plausible case for the idea that the breached oil well in the Gulf of Mexico might have set up the perfect environment for a cataclysmic natural event that would result in the virtual annihilation of the human race.

Is it true? I have no idea, but it didn’t strike me as utterly ridiculous. I mean, this planet has been spinning around for millions of years, and lots of catastrophic events have been reported. I think we humans can get pretty arrogant sometimes, when we think that nothing of that magnitude could happen to us. I say, “Why the hell not?”

My friend was concerned about the implication that the government is well aware of the impending doom and has deliberately squelched the truth. My reaction was and is what good would it do to tell 300 million people that circumstances beyond the control of any human being are likely to lead to the destruction of our world as we know it? Let’s look at the possibilities:

1. The President goes on TV and tells us the facts, and they ain’t pretty. People panic, start spilling out into the streets, screaming, running, snarling traffic, causing riots. Great.

2.People panic and do what comes naturally. Everybody grabs a partner and gets frisky. A good percentage of the hetero couples will conceive a child that very night. The party goes on for days and weeks, and the ob-gyns can’t keep up with the demand. Harmless, you say? Well, what if this writer is wrong? What if, despite all the science that he says supports his prediction, it doesn’t happen? We will have millions more mouths to feed in an economy that is barely capable of sustaining the ones already here.

3.The Republicans in Congress will label the prediction a ruse started by the Democrats to encourage people to look to their government for protection, thus strengthening the argument for bigger government and more spending. (Spending on what? Don’t confuse them with reality please!)

4.The Birthers and other tea baggers will blame Obama for the methane bubble phenomenon, because he was not born in America, and God is leveling his wrath upon him and the rest of us, which is unfair, of course, but God knows what he’s doing.

Naw, none of that makes any sense to me. I’ll do what I did while waiting for Y2K to wreak havoc with the world and all the other doomsday events. Nothing. Absolutamente nada. If the event occurs as it is predicted, we’ll never know what hit us. There will be no warning, and there are no preparations to be made. No Last Wills and Testaments required; nobody will be left to inherit anything. No worries about leaving debts for family members to be stuck paying; nobody will be left to pay them.

As frightening as that article was at first, and it was, I say “As You Were.” There ain’t nothin’ we can do about it.