THE END OF DAYS

Courtesy of NASA

Yesterday, at 3 o’clock in the cold dark winter’s morning, I clocked up seventy years, sixty-nine summers on this planet. From my birth in 1942, halfway through one of the most horrific wars in human history, evil primitive psychopathic madness almost triumphed; threatening to plunge mankind back into primeval darkness.  In the first three years of my life, sixty-million people were slaughtered including six-million Jews – two-thirds of civilian European Jews - and hundreds of thousands of other innocent ethnic minorities were almost wiped out. 

With truly great unselfish courage, sacrifice of life, pain, loss, intelligence and fortitude, the sane, good people of the world armed themselves and fought to the death to defeat the cruel and insane forces of darkness, manifest as the evil dictators of that era. We still need to be prepared to fight to the death at all times, to block the horrifying mad ambitions that can emerge in any of us; to try to exercise power, to take dominion and to enslave the world, by any means, at any price.

World War 1 and World War 11 just twenty years later, left my parents’ generation deeply traumatised – but they then managed to reduce wars, partly by forming The European Union; saving most of my generation from the horrors of military action (i.e. killing men, women and children).  As I grew up and we were able to thank Europe for peace and prosperity (that has lasted 67 years), I recall my father, who had sailed on the lethal ammunition convoys across the North Atlantic, then became an accountant, making his only prediction - that my generation’s war would be economic conflict.

I think we are in the middle of that economic war – between the crazed 0.5% who want to personally own the world and the sane 99.5% who want fairness, justice, calm, creative work and harmony. Mad people are madly determined and, like psychopathic leaders throughout history, are highly charismatic. We like their sense of certainty – however illogical their crazy vision is.

THE END REALLY, REALLY, REALLY IS NIGH

However – let’s move on to even more frightening prospects. Coinciding with me entering the last phase of my life, as is only to be expected and as is right and proper, I am sorry to tell you that if I have to end, the world is also about to end – and perhaps the whole universe will blink out of existence on my unwilling exit.

21^st December 2012 – Those wonderful accountants the mezzo-American Mayans, who left us to our fate in about  800AD, ended their stone baked calendar at the 21^st December this year. NASA and other scientific spoilsports argue that the world will continue after that date; but what do they know? Teams of hundreds of top boffins can’t even keep track of the Higgs Boson, never mind the Ancients’ complex omni-celestial astronomical calendar.

We pundits and futurists are not sure of the exact time – but does midnight seem appropriate for ending it all? Or perhaps dawn is more customary for executing the entire population of a planet – “The prisoner ate a hearty breakfast”.

HOW? Well, the first and most immediate trigger is that on 21^st December – the Winter Solstice, The Shortest Day (and last day?), Earth’s neighbouring planets line up on one side of us – and so exert a strong gravitational pull. This will crack open the Earth – and we will all die.  Or, every 2,737 years, the Earth wobbles nearer to or away from the Sun (take your choice) which triggers terrible calamities. Or, every 9,000 years or so, another wobble (precession) triggers an Ice Age, which mops up the oceans, leaves us high and dry and freezes us all to death. Or, every 62 million years or so, our insignificant little Solar and Planetary system, racing round the Milky Way at 514,000 miles an hour, dips and rises out of the galactic equatorial shadow that protects us from deadly cosmic rays – which then zap the planet causing mass-extinctions. And if none of those cycles or Acts of God get us – eventually the Sun will expand massively into a Red Giant, and burn us all to death. Unless – the human race finds a way to keep me alive forever, to give me immortality, in which case I will ward off all these threats.

Long life and happiness to you all.