September 27, 2010
from the comments
I, too, remember the “Duck and Cover” drills of the cold war days. I remember seeing my father going over plans for the building of a personal bomb shelter–and then not doing that anymore when data about the effect a single five megaton warhead would have on a metropolitan area was released. The lie of civil defense just couldn’t be sustained anymore. This kind of threat, though, seemed huge and general–similar to a great comet streaking toward the Earth that nobody could do anything about. The doom it suggested played into my hedonistic tendencies at the time.
9/11 gave me a sense of a different kind of fragility. It was like a story of a gnat getting into a machine and causing a tiny short that sets off a cascade failure. My sense of the status of apocalyptic fears in play now is that an always present element has become much more powerful: an actual desire for apocalypse–whether it be held by terrorists who think their best shot at long term power would lie in wiping the slate clean, crawling back out, and making a new push for significance, or American religious fundamentalists who see the “next” world as the real one and would be pleased to see god’s great plan expedited (as if his “need” for us to do that is not ironic). I am personally more fearful of the American fundamentalists, since they have become politically viable and this nation has more powers of mass destruction than any other.
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Glad you flagged this, Deron. I was particularly taken and astonished by Daryl’s writing here. I’m rather envious of his ability to convey his thoughts here.