{"id":943,"date":"2009-08-04T08:18:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-04T12:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/08\/04\/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-well-be-fine\/"},"modified":"2009-08-04T08:18:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-04T12:18:00","slug":"the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-well-be-fine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/08\/04\/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-well-be-fine\/","title":{"rendered":"The end of the world as we know it (and we’ll be fine)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update: A commenter below sent along this totally great link <\/a>to a website that compiles end-of-the-earth trivia. <\/p>\n

Turns out there’s a lot more end-times stuff out there than I realized. What’s next, an End of the World Network? All Armageddon all the Time?<\/p>\n

Main Post:<\/p>\n

There’s something peculiar about the American psyche: We’re optimists by nature, so ebullient at times that it drives people crazy.<\/p>\n

When I lived in Germany as a young man one of my teachers lectured me in front of a class about our national penchant for saying hello to strangers.<\/p>\n

“You say things like, ‘It’s great to see you,’ when you don’t mean it,” he muttered. “You wave to each other like you’re in a parade.”<\/p>\n

But Americans also love the idea that absolute mayhem is just around the corner.<\/p>\n

One of our earliest philosophers — before the pragmatists, before the free-market boosters — was Jonathan Edwards, a puritan who liked to remind his flock that they were sinners in the hands of an angry god.<\/p>\n

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family where the Apocalypse was a matter of dinner-table conversation, in all its lurid, Book of Revelations glory.<\/p>\n

That kind of doomsday thinking colored my childhood, as the arms race with the Soviet Union threatened to turn the planet to a cinder.<\/p>\n

And it still permeates American culture. Check out the trailer<\/a> for the new Hollywood blockbuster “2012.”<\/p>\n

The movie claims to offer “the truth” about an ancient Mayan end-time prophecy, which apparently includes a Noah-like flood overwhelming the Himalayas.<\/p>\n

High culture mavens dig this stuff, too.<\/p>\n

Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant 2006 novel “The Road” (coming soon to a cineplex<\/a> near you) tells the story of a father and son living in post-Armageddon America.<\/p>\n

Political activists of all stripes have embraced the vocabulary of meltdown.<\/p>\n

On the left, some green activists predict the imminent unraveling of the planet’s ecosystems. They suggest that America’s political institutions are so corrupted by corporate influence as to be nearly meaningless.<\/p>\n

On the right, many conservatives are convinced that President Barack Obama is a foreign manchurian candidate, bent on destroying capitalism, subverting democracy and leaving us all vulnerable to Islamic terrorists.<\/p>\n

Both sides agree — at least in some of their more heated rhetoric — that America is a fallen nation, its promise unfulfilled, its economy nearly terminal.<\/p>\n

(See Slate’s new essay about how America is “going to end<\/a>“)<\/p>\n

I know my German teacher would sigh and shake his head, but I’m convinced that all the gloomy talk is, at best, a kind of self-titillation and, at worst, a deliberate act of manipulation.<\/p>\n

Some also embrace this kind of hysteria as an excuse to do nothing.<\/p>\n

The truth is, America’s democratic institutions are more transparent and fair than ever before.<\/p>\n

In the golden age of a century ago, blacks and women couldn’t vote; US Senators were chosen by party bosses behind closed doors; and whole cities were run by political gangsters.<\/p>\n

America’s economy, for all its hiccups, is larger and more robust and more inclusive by orders of magnitude than it was when I was a child. <\/p>\n

We don’t just have a black President. We have a black middle class. A generation ago, both were pipe dreams.<\/p>\n

And the environment? Thirty years ago, rivers were bursting into flames. PCBs were being dumped in school yards. DDT was thrown around like confetti.<\/p>\n

Global terrorism? Scary, yes — but not half so scary as the fear that the United States and the Soviet Union might sterilize the face of the planet with atomic bombs.<\/p>\n

None of this is to say that there aren’t real concerns out there.<\/p>\n

From carbon loading to political corruption to the recession to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the genocide in Sudan, Americans face huge challenges.<\/p>\n

But our experience as a nation demonstrates two things.<\/p>\n

First, in our society everything is always changing fast, thanks in large measure to a ton of hard work and a generous amount of risk-taking and ingenuity.<\/p>\n

And second, most of that change produces a clumsy but measurable kind of progress.<\/p>\n

So unless those Mayans got it right and fireballs start raining out of the sky (or maybe it’ll be aliens or zombies or a planet-wide plague or a giant comet…) we’re stuck with what we’ve got.<\/p>\n

That is: A pretty great world and some problems that we have an obligation to try to fix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update: A commenter below sent along this totally great link to a website that compiles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}