Things That Are Going To Kill Us All

Hello friends. Me again. Back for more.

This is normally the part in the post how this might be the last post I ever make, since, you know, the Mayans are going to kill us all tomorrow or something.

Except they're not.

We're supposed to all be of the impression that the world is ending tomorrow.  Apparently, our fate as a planet was hewn into a rock a long time ago, and somewhere between the time I go to sleep tonight and the time I wake up, the world will end.  No one is sure HOW it all ends, but it just does.  Galactic alignment?  Dunno.  Great Flood?  Maybe.  The death of the Twinkie?  Compelling argument.

"Now is not the time for fear; that comes later."

But let me tell you how everything is REALLY going to shake out: 2 hours from now, I'm going to go to sleep.  8 hours from now, I'm going to wake up.  99.99998% of the world's population will wake up tomorrow.  Those that don't... well... it won't be because of the Mayans.

But rational people know this.  Rational people know a lot of things.

However, that's never stopped people from freaking out at every tiny little thing ever.

And don't think this whole post is just about Mayans and 2012. No.  This is a generational thing.  Thinking that something is going to kill us all is such a regular occurrence that you can go back through the years and pinpoint, per year or per decade, the thing(s) that were going to kill us all.

Don't believe me?


1950s - The Commies
1960s - Nukes
1970s - Nixon/The Vietnamese/Overpopulation/Global Cooling
1980s - Reagan/The Commies/Capitalism
1990s - Gangs/HIV/AIDS/Ebola
2000 - y2k (to be fair, there was a larger concern about y2k in 1999)
2001 - Anthrax/Terrorists
2002 - West Nile/George W. Bush
2003 - Mad Cow Disease/George W. Bush
2004 - SARS/George W. Bush
2005 - Bird Flu/George W. Bush
2006 - Killer Bees/e.Coli/George W. Bush
2007 - Salmonella/Foot-And-Mouth Disease/George W. Bush
2008 - Global Warming/George W. Bush
2009 - Swine Flu
2010 - Swine Flu Vaccines
2011 - Large Hadron Collider/Higgs Boson
2012 - KONY/Mitt Romney/The Mayans
2013 - ??? (Though I've already been reading that "2013" in and of itself is extraordinarily unlucky, and the kind folks in Times Square in New York City are going to painstaking measures to make sure and mitigate as much of that bad luck as possible)

And yet, despite the massive odds against us, here we all stand, unscathed for the most part, by the very things which, year after year after year, were supposed to destroy us all.

We're a hearty bunch, we humans.  It's going to take a lot more than some calendar on a rock to kill all of us off.

In fact, my money is on the sun going red dwarf on all of us.

In about 6 billion years.

So sleep tight until then.

And seriously, don't sweat the Mayan stuff.

See you all in the morning (well, most of you...)

To worldwide calamities! The alarmists' version of a parent's empty threats!