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How Many Times Have You Died, and Of What Causes?
Seems like there have been at least half a dozen times we were all going to die since Trump assumed office. Net Neutrality? Pulling out of the Paris Accords climate boondoggle? Etc. But the immediate destruction of the world is hardly new to having Trump as PotUS. I was trying to count all the times I have died and of what causes during my lifetime, but with all the goalpost moving, it can be so hard to keep up.
OccupantCDN’s Ice Free Montana had a video the other day that went through the timeline of when Montana’s glaciers were supposed to all be melted starting with the first prediction of 1941, if I remember correctly. They just removed signs that said they would all be gone next year. (Surprise! They’re still there!) That is hardly the only one of the many, many dire predictions that have had to be moved back because the predictions did not come to fruition.
Global warming? I hear we now have to act in the next twelve years, or we will be beyond the point of no return. Of course, the first time I heard that prediction, I think it expired close to twenty years ago. It is very much like the various Millenarianist sects who keep having to move back the date of the Second Coming. Does anybody remember the Great Disappointment? Of course not, it was before we were born happening on October 22, 1844. But I bet we all remember predicted dates for the Apocalypse that came and went without anything happening other than one religious group’s disappointment.
Hey, remember the end of the Mayan calendar cycle? That was fun.
I’m old enough to have been alive when The Population Bomb was first published. According to that, we were all going to starve in the 1970s and 1980s unless we stopped people from reproducing. It was all very Malthusian. Of course, Old Tom first wrote about the idea in 1798, and we’re still producing more and more and the population has not kept up with production, so the world is much richer per capita than it was in 1798 or 1968.
Then there was nuclear winter. Because of nuclear testing, and if we had a nuclear war, so much particulate matter would get into the upper atmosphere that we would cool down and the Earth would go back into an Ice Age. That was in the 1970s, I believe.
Then there was the fact that a mad cowboy had been elected and had his finger on the nuclear button. We were all going to die because he’d get us into a war. What? No, not George W. Bush. Ronald Reagan, back in the 1980s. Bush came later.
Somewhere along the way, there was Global Warming, especially Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). But then it didn’t happen fast enough and there were cooler periods, so AGW was now supposed to bring on an ice age. For a while, they changed it to Global Weirding, and then to Climate Change. I don’t remember how many changes it went through or how many predicted must-act-before dates whizzed by over the last thirty years.
What else? Y2K was supposed to have major disruptions of computers that would have planes crashing into buildings and probably the end of civilization.
I’m sure I am missing at least two hundred things that were predicted to have killed me by now. How about you? Are you old enough to have died due to the Silent Spring of 1962? Something even before that? What have I missed that you died of, perhaps multiple times?
Published in History
Per Dr Bastiat, You People Are Weird
Ah. Thanks!
It works now!
Yes, but the thing about both of those Death Bringers is that mankind will NOT be the cause! Is this category only about man-made crises or can it include general catastrophes?
It can include general catastrophes that we are being warned about, but are overhyped.
I’m pretty sure that humans are causing all catastrophes anyway, or at least Donald Trump is, so we don’t have to worry (about what to worry about).
I think my SARS died of swine flu.
Remember when George W. Bush caused Hurricane Katrina to hit New Orleans? Good times. Good times.
I had assumed east of I-5 were all trailer-dwelling, meth-addled, walmart-shopping hillbillies.
And your point? 😉
In the 50s there was a great fear that nuclear testing was changing the weather. You hear references to it in the TV and radio shows of the day, and it was probably one more thing the smart people used as evidence against that amiable dunce in the White House. He didn’t care! He was destroying the planet! (Pops a Miltown)
Completely forgotten today. NEVERMIND
Wow! So that started with Ike. I knew they gave him the press of a duffer and a dunce (despite rising to general of the armies and winning the war in Europe), but didn’t know they had that going on back then.
That reminds me. I’ve died of fracking technology a couple of times.
Was it painful?
Same old. Like all the other times Republicans or business have killed me. After the first few times you get used to it.
Cyclamates killed us all back in the 70s. Aspartame was going to kill us outright, then had its malevolent side-effects cut back to causing brain damage. Red dye #2 was another fast track to the dark side. And I seem to recall Opie Taylor stating that “tasting indelible will kill you dead.”
I died of frankenfood-induced famine/malnutrition.
I was thinking Tsathoggua, but death by Pepe seems plausible too.
True, but there is a proliferation of doom such that there is a new Horseman of the Apocalypse born every week.
Anyone feeling left out? Consider radon.
Black mold.
It goes better in most songs if you include the “toxic.” “Toxic Black Mold” has a great rhythm.
I saw Toxic Black Mold open for Anthrax in Rochester in ’85.
They usually open for The Black Death, so that must have been some concert.
The odds are that we will probably be all right . . .
…Of embarrassment? Countless times.
We’ve all been there.
I’ll bet your parents didn’t have the same sense of humor as mine tho……
Probably not. My father’s sense of humor is very warped. My mother’s is very wicked. I got both.
I would be replying to your magnificent essay, except that I had lost all electrical power and computing ability due to Y2K, Midnight Jan 1st 2000.
People did put a lot of effort into solving that problem and I think that’s why it ended up not a big deal. I’ve seen AGW believers use it as an example on how to attack Global Climate Change, we put an all out effort on Y2K and solved it. Of course Y2K was a definable problem with a solution that could be implemented. None of which applies to climate change.