An introduction of sorts to the concept that while the world might be coming to an end, we can still hope for the best and write about it while it lasts.
The cloudy, pitch black night was suddenly rent by deafening thunder. Despite the snow that lay several feet thick on the ground I slept with the window cracked open, relishing the frigid air as I was warmed by thick blankets.
The crashing boom awoke me, but not in time to show me the first bright flash. I saw the second soon after, however, and heard the thunderclap that followed almost immediately.
By then, in my 14 years on the planet, I had never witnessed a lightning storm in the middle of a northern Canadian winter. I had heard the thunder roll in with the spring rains. I had felt it break the grip of the summer heat. I had watched as the concussions appeared to knock the autumn leaves off the trees. But never had I seen the intense bolts light up the frozen white land. I did not even know that such weather was possible.
However, in my (at that time) short life I had always been well aware of something else even more frightening: the threat of atomic annihilation. As a result of that perverse comprehension, my young mind leapt to what then seemed the most likely conclusion: This was the start of a nuclear war. I crawled out of bed to peer out the window, to fearfully witness the end of the world. Sheet lightning flashed and then flashed again, the thunder following after a few seconds. Gradually, as I woke up a little more, I realized it was just a storm – an unusual one, but natural nonetheless. No bombs were falling. Humanity would live one more night, at least. So I went back to bed.
Please excuse my foolish young self. I was born at the height of the Cold War, mere months before the United States and the Soviet Union almost broke into open armed conflict when Washington stopped Moscow from stationing city-destroying missiles in Cuba. The members of my age group – which floats in an apparent limbo between the Baby Boomers and Generation X – had learned from birth that human civilization would at any moment bring itself to a fiery end. It was not a matter of if, but of when. Both superpowers had atomic bombs and they were itching to use them.
My Generation Limbo managed to escape the hysteria of the 1950s, when families dug bomb shelters in their backyards and children were taught how to hide beneath their desks in the event of an attack. But that was only because by the 1960s people realized that neither of those measures would help anyone survive a full-scale exchange of ICBMs, or the resulting radioactive fall-out and nuclear winter. Anyone who paid any attention to the goings on in the world – as did my friends and I – could not but help see that all the wars, intrigue, name-calling and politics were mere prologue to the inevitable nuclear conflagration.
However, to our great surprise we survived into adulthood and some of us even made it into middle age. Along the way, things actually got better. People on both sides of the US-USSR divide seemed to finally realize that peace was preferable to mutually assured destruction. The Soviet Union’s last secretary general, Mikhail Gorbachev, relaxed the totalitarianism and loosened Moscow’s grip on its satellite states. He called for a truce and Washington accepted.
I was lucky to have been present when the people of Germany tore down that seemingly impregnable symbol of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. Afterwards, I witnessed East Germans restore their democracy and independence. I rejoiced at the wonder of it all, documented the incredible history-in-the-making and began to look forward to enjoying a long, full life, uninterrupted by a human-inflicted global catastrophe.
Please, once again, excuse my foolish younger self. He could not have known that there are few things in this world as enduring as greed and avarice – that self-interest, regarded as a virtue, would continue to blind so many to the huge threats society faces as a whole. That blindness would stop the very people who could solve the big problems from even admitting they exist.
The drive to amass wealth and to hold onto the power it brings has, as so many already know despite the many that deny it, brought the planet’s climate to the brink of uncontrollable change. The solution is obvious and consequently simple: elimination of the pollutants that poison our air and heat up our atmosphere and oceans. Unfortunately, too many people put their own short-sighted interests ahead of the survival of human civilization, hiding behind feigned ignorance as they bleat that it’s all a hoax, that the climate couldn’t possibly be changing. All the while, as the symptoms in the form of weather-event calamities grow in strength and frequency, the powers-that-be are too busy wringing every last dollar they can out of their fossil-fuel reserves to bother doing anything that could actually benefit humanity as a whole.
However, not all hope is lost. After all, that boom I heard as a boy was not an atomic explosion, but merely lightning. We survived the Cold War and we can survive the threat of climate change, as long as we do what is already within the capabilities of our society and technology. All we need is enough men and women who understand that intelligence and rational actions must trump greed and blind ignorance.
Then we can all go back to bed.
Комментарии