Is it the end of the world as we know it? Oct. 18, 1985

  

We had an earthquake this morning: Passaic, Central Manhattan, the Greater Metropolitan area.

I thought it was a dream. Well, not exactly.

I was driving home from work when the radio announcer said his staff was trying to find out what had caused the shaking in the studio a moment before.

I had taken no notice of it. But in some places whole buildings shook and streets even cracked. A three point eight, they claimed later on.

When I got home my uncle said our building shook, too.

“Strange,” I said, then went to bed, falling asleep almost immediately and dreamed about the earthquake.

I dreamed that none of the local people who worked on cars in the car port outside my apartment would believe me when I charged out into the yard naked telling them the world was about to end.

Later I woke to the sound of their voices in the yard, the usual laughing and carousing that comes on Saturday. Then I heard them talking about the end of the world. I went out, if not completely naked, then underdressed and said, “You mean there really was an earthquake?”

They all looked at me and nodded, and said, “Sure.”

Tony kept talking about how things are changing and how there are too many things like this going on. The lady at the printer said pretty much the same thing. Someone else said, “God is unhappy with the world.”

For me there are too many disasters come faster and faster. Nostradamus predicted the end of the world for 1996. But we would see a host of wars and disasters throughout the 1980s first, each getting worse as the decade progressed.

We are half way through that decades and wars are being wages around the globe – Afghanistan, Iran-Iraq, Nicaragua, Philippines, Lebanon, South Africa. There are riots in London, scandals in France.

All scary stuff.

Some of us thought things were bad when Mount Saint Helens went up, the first serious volcanic eruption on the continental US in a very, very long time.

Here, close to home, the Great Dundee fire came and went, taking with it homes of more than 50 families and the jobs of thousands of others, echoing the great Philadelphia fire last year. Mexico had four quick earthquakes in a row causing whole cities to collapse.

I started to wondering what would happen if cities all did that, fires erupting as gas lines ruptured, people trapped and crushed in the rubble.

This was followed by a milder version in Peru, then the South Pacific, and still more in California, followed by a very serious one in Russia.

What the hell was going on? Are the end days really upon us?

Pauly, who is a notorious chicken little, is having a field day with all this, which, of course, is how I hear about it, since he calls me up every time something like this happens, saying, “Didn’t I tell you?”

As a child of the Duck and Cover era, I always thought human kind would destroy itself, unleashing nuclear catastrophe. But it seems God may lend a hand, giving new meaning to the big bang theory. I guess God doesn’t want to be outclassed by lowly fools like the human race. If we can blow up the world, God can do it better.

 

1985 Menu 


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