Global warming, meteors, nuclear war, peak oil, genetic crops,...all doom and gloom for decades

[The Straight Story]

I used to just think it was us Christians who had the Armageddon complex.

I listen to the radio, and I hear the fear commercials - ' getting this scan saved my LIFE', talk to your doctor about this, you might have X - see your dr today.

I read the internet, and from the left and right I am barraged with all death all day - The end is near, if I could trademark that phrase I would make bill gates looks like a poor boy.

It's always something coming to kill us off. Always. In my 41 years of life I heard have a lot about the end times. The end of my life if I don't do X, and even if I do it because of Y.

So fuck it all. I am a smoking & drinking bastard who will eat fried foods until they cart my ass off in a hearst.

If the meteorites don't get me, then some new virus will, bird flu will get me, nope - peak oil, well maybe it will be global warming dooming me, or terrorists with nukes, or that disease I never heard of, or pollution, car wreck....

Or maybe I will die when some christian's belt buckle hits my head when his clothes drop off as he flies up to meet Jesus at the rapture.

Maybe we create our own mythologies based on our own human frailty. We each know we face death, so we want to make it a group deal so we ain't going alone like my mom did in her hospital bed.

yeah - there ARE real concerns we can face, it just seems to get a bit out of hand at times. Too many people - hell I was told in the 70's we would all be dead now by overpopulation, disease, new ice age, nuclear war, etc.

Live like you are dying, cause you are. We can't and won't stop our own demise.

So if you're worried, here is my advice:

Get a pack of smokes, a bottle of rum, go out side and flip off the sky and tell those meteorites and green house gases, etc, to fuck off and quit worrying about it.

Either our preachers or our scientists will fix it all. Or they won't. Either way, worrying won't solve a damned thing but to give your doctor more money to treat your ulcers.

Things will be ok, and if they are not you will be dead and not worrying about it anyway :)

(On a serious note, as I said, there are real problems to deal with and we should, just seems over alarmist at times....)

[kimmerspixelated]

1. Well, if you think bad things will happen they will.

Too many stay focused on the bad, and that's what they get-more bad. Just think if everyone practiced THE LAW OF ATTRACTION, what a great place this world would be.

[The Straight Story]

2. My y2k bunker is still stocked up

So when 'the big one' hits, whatever it may be, I can rest assured I will live out my days in a small room with rice and water.

Scratch that, i am ditching the water to make more room for beer :)

[GCP]

3. Much as I've come to dislike Michael Crichton

And his book State of Fear is a total piece of schlock - its underlying theme is that there's some kind of process going on where academics get their funding from finding something really scary and hyping the hell out of it.
Unfortunately he included a real threat - global warming - in with all the other bogus problems.

[The Straight Story]

5. Life is fragile, and there is always some sort of threat to it. My mom used to say:

"I'll do what I want because when it is my time to go it's my time"

She made it to 70 doing all the bad things we tell people not to. Maybe she could have eeked out another 10 or 15 years, but she enjoyed the ones she had here the way she wanted to live em.

We come from nothing and go back into it. Sure it sucks, but I think at times our society, me included, have issues with death.

I do believe in an afterlife, but I sure as hell ain't in a hurry to check it out. But someday I will, and if I let that fear of it drive me every day to try and avoid I will miss out I think on a lot of things.

I ain't worried about me anymore - though I do worry for my daughter. So yeah, I can take problems seriously, but have learned not to take em too serious anymore.

My mom used to tell me they were talking about the end of the world when she was a little girl back in the late 30's. Her world ended, but ours is still floundering about.

The potential exists, sure. It always has though through various methods. More likely now? Sure.

But I still won't give into the fear mongers peddling everything from bush's terra alerts to a new ice age. Shit happens, then ya die.

[toddaa]

4. Mortality's like that

Everybody dies. People try all sorts of tricks to get around it, but none of them work. We're all going to die. Deal with it.

[The Straight Story]

6. Damn Straight

I think some of our earlier cultures dealt with it a lot better than we do. Maybe I am wrong.

I don't burying our head in the sand is the best way to deal with issues, but I also don't think running around like a chicken with it's head cut off over everything helps either.

[toddaa]

7. We've been insolated from death

It's only been in the past 50 or so years that we as Americans have had the luxury of living to old age. Prior to that, the ravages of disease and war meant that it was quite common for everyone to experience the death of family members at a much younger age and on a much greater frequency. That's the experience of most of the world's population today. We have been living in a very unique period that is probably going to be coming to an end in the next few decades. That doesn't mean, however, that the world is going to end. We're just going to be joining the reality that the rest of the human race deals with on a daily basis.

Think of it not as the end of civilization as we know, but going back to work after a long and relaxing vacation.

[pretzel4gore]

8. remember the 'war on poverty'?

lyndon johnson declared war on poverty a lifetime ago, and it kind of worked, for awhile, but the rightwing fought back, and since then we've had wars on everything but poverty! That was the idea, of the 'wars' on drugs, crime and now terror (none of which can measurably be diminished due to national effort, unlike poverty; indeed reducing poverty also reduces crime and drug use!)
And it's the same with the chicken little's 'the sky's falling' theme applied to probably the biggest threat to mr pig's gluttonous existence ever - global warming. The facts are stark and undeniable...we've pumped 200 billion metric tonnes of carbon into earth's 12 mile thick atmosphere since steam engine times, and we're pumping 6 billion tonnes each and every year. Even w/out the problem with moisture (due to irrigation and farming etc, there are tens of million acre feet of water in the air that shouldn't be there) it's obvious such a rate of carbonization of the atmosphere is not healthy, even w/out advocating anything, the brutal fact can't be denied. Yet deny it is the main idea behind alot of the rightwing's tactics- 2 plus 2 doesn't necessarily =4, not if the media says so!GM built almost a thousand electric cars years ago after State of california made law that the auto makers had to produce cars which don't put carbon in the air: GM etc fought the law while going along with it, until finally bush election eased up. Today the EV1 is gone: GM refused to renew leases and the sneaky sniffling criminals crushed the last EV1 despite tremendous effort by citizens to save them:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/223/index.html 'who killed the electric car'
you gotta all see this show- it tells us that way back in model-t era, electric cars were built and succesfully used (just like the fact hemp ie pot, was once one of the biggest cash crop in the usa) then the auto oil industries stopped it...so it's not just chicken little, it's a vast political effort to deny people easiest solution to car pollution (they're trying to say still-to-be-developed hydrogen cars will be answer to pollution problem, when the electric car is already ready to roll while hydrogen just never work!) the bastards even bought up the company which was gonna built new ultra batteries, which would increase EV1 mileage from 300 miles to 500(?) miles, then they shut the project down! So please don't fall into the rightwing trap of muddying the waters of legitimate concern by hohumming global warming along with new ice age or meteorites etc Carbon gangsterism you know it's real, see 'syriana', and it's a battle we are going to win, but time will not forgive wasting it