Dick Cheney went hunting and shot his hunting partner in the face. George Bush shot the whole country in the foot. Now Tea Party anarchists are shooting it in the gut. The U.S.A. is reeling, but many voters pay little attention to politics because life is more important. Trouble is, if we keep electing anarchists who want to wreck the economy, we may not get much chance at living life.
Some people believe that the head-butting in Washington is a sure sign of a coming Apocalypse, and that it will strike in December, 2012. What is more, they are paying specialist builders up to a million dollars per person to build underground survival bunkers, deep silos that go down a dozen stories, airtight, and with supplies, seeds, and hydroponic gardens. Where they’ll get power when their oil runs out, the promoter didn’t say.
It’s a throwback to the 1950s–1970s, when the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R, were stock piling atom bombs in a policy known as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. In upper New York State, a back-yard bomb shelter race got going, people building reinforced concrete rooms underground in their back yards, stocking them with water and food, figuring to hunker down while the hydrogen bombs were exploding, then come out and get on with life. I had one of them say to me that it might be good for the world to have less people in it. MAD, for sure.
Had a thousand, a hundred, even a dozen nukes exploded, a lot of the world would have been wrecked and poisoned, dead and dying people everywhere, radiation killing millions more, nuclear winter coming, humanity’s turn to follow the dinosaurs. Anyone expecting to emerge into such a world was MAD, for sure.
But the Apocalypse, according to the Bible, is not the end of the world, more like the end of the world as we know it, a total re-do, leading to a new and better world. Are the bunker builders hoping to avoid this new and better world? Do they prefer the one we’ve got? Do they think God won’t notice them down there?
Were I sure the Apocalypse were coming, I’d search for a wide open meadow or climb a hilltop and greet it with open arms.