I hear things all the time that the world is in total chaos, the end is near, and doomsday is upon us. It's true that things are looking dismal lately, but I seriously doubt that the end of the world is just around the corner. In reality nobody knows exactly when the end of the world will happen, it's not even stated in the Bible. Things seem bad in the world. Our government spends money as if we have an endless supply of it, while our deficit grows with every passing day. Terrorist's want the U.S. to burn, while we fight a war that's very unpredictable with no end in sight. Bombings happen daily overseas, and random shootings at schools and movie theaters are plastered all over the television. After all I have mentioned and with the upcoming ending of the Mayan calender, people seem to get the idea that everything will end soon, and honestly I don't blame them.
Lets go back about seventy years and take a look at how the world was then. World War 2 was just beginning for the United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Our government was in debt, people were poor, and things were looking grim. The Nazi's were slowly taking control of Europe. There were even random shootings happening in schools, city streets, and anywhere else you can think of. Now if you compare what was happening then with whats going on now, doesn't the comparison almost parallel each other?
Now go back another seventy to eighty years. Our country was split into two parts, the civil war was in full force, slavery was welcomed in the south, the government was slaughtering Native Americans, and a president was assassinated as the country was slowly falling apart with no hope for the United States. Doesn't it almost look as if a pattern is forming here? The farther you go back into our history, the worse things seem to get. Before the civil war we had the Revolutionary War as the U.S. fought for independence from England. Things were even worse in the century where Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic. The Black Plague killed close to 75 to 200 million people in the four years that it was at its peak, which is close to sixty percent of the worlds population at that time.
Today the argument that things are bad in these modern times because of how rapidly the environment is changing around us still arises. It's true that the polar ice caps are melting and even some weather patterns around the world are different than they were twenty years ago. The devastation the record setting outbreak of tornadoes caused last year in the south east of the United States made religious fanatics go in a tizzy, stating it was Gods wrath at work. What most don't seem to remember is that a record setting outbreak of tornadoes also struck the south east in the early seventies, killing quite a few people. The same goes for hurricane Katrina. One of the worst hurricanes in the last twenty years, but go back to the early nineties and you get hurricane Andrew. What made Katrina so bad were the levy's that broke, killing most of the population that stayed behind. As a storm goes though, hurricane Andrew was a worse storm in terms of strength. One hundred years prior to Katrina, another hurricane hit the east coast of the U.S. killing thousands. Bad weather happens all the time and like anything else it comes in phases. Our National Weather Service has only been keeping records for the last 150 years. There is close to a couple billion years before records were even kept that we have no idea how bad weather patterns might have been before a human being was able to comprehend his surroundings. There is scientific findings throughout the history of the world were the earth went through drastic climate changes, either getting very hot or very cold in a short amount of time. Scientists have come to the conclusion that the earth has gone through at least three ice age's in the last one-hundred thousand years. Things change!
What I'm basically getting at is the world seems to be in a bad place right now, and a lot of it should be blamed on our technology. The internet, television, and cell phones feed us all of this bad information from around the world, which gives us the impression that everything is going straight to hell. In World War 2 we had no idea how bad things were over seas until the solders were sent back home and they told their families and friends just how bad things were. Today we see people dying on cobble stoned streets on CNN and a daily death toll of our solders through internet postings. Its sad to see the statistics and the news reels, but its true that we're constantly fed bad news on a daily bases. Sometimes its nice to just turn off your television, close your laptop, put you cell in your pocket, and just walk away from the bad news from time to time. As for the weather and how things are changing, its happened before just as its happening now. The world isn't ending just because the temperature has risen a few degree's or a major storm kills hundreds; these things happen and will keep happening. Just go with the flow, and don't worry so much.
No comments:
Post a Comment