Robert McHenry: Doomsday Theory ... Watch Out!
[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.]
Sometime in the very early 1950s my family made a car trip from California to Missouri, and I’m guessing that we took Route 66, “the highway that’s the best.” My father drove right though the first night, and very early in the morning, before dawn, I remember hearing a voice on the radio talking about an imminent test of an atomic bomb at Yucca Flats, Nevada. As we listened to the countdown, I looked out my window to the left – north – and at “zero” I saw a glow rise up over the distant mountains. I’d seen them on television, for in those days A-bomb tests were novelties and perfect stuff for the relatively new technology of live coast-to-coast broadcast, but this was my first live one. In a way I wish I could say that I recall feeling a chill or something of the sort, but I didn’t. I was six or seven, and it was just a thing that happened.
In those days one heard a great deal of talk to the effect that “We never had weather like this before they started exploding those things.” The notion was common enough to become a punch line for comics. I have no memory of what sort of weather it was that needed explanation, but whatever it was we seem to have come through it. As we usually do.
Then there was the strontium-90 in the milk. Or maybe it wasn’t in the milk yet but was threatened; I’m not entirely sure. But however it may have been, I went to school each day, and at lunchtime I stood in line for my turn to put two cents into a slot in the milk machine and then slide the little bottle along a channel to the place where you could pull it out. I wasn’t supposed to get chocolate milk, my mother said, but I did sometimes. It could be that the chocolate offset the strontium-90, if there was any. In any case, I didn’t get radiation poisoning, nor did any of my classmates, not even the ones who dutifully drank white milk every day.
In high school I survived the Great Cranberry Panic of ’59. Thanksgiving came and went that year, as always, and hardly anybody died on account of it, apart from those who may have choked on a turkey bone.
You’ll notice that I have passed over the more commonplace childhood perils – swallowing a watermelon seed, for example, or stepping on a crack in the sidewalk. Those were simply the everyday dangers that all children learned to cope with, or else. A sociobiologist would see the hand of natural selection in them. (Well, not the sidewalk crack one, I guess, for the threat was to your grandmother, who was presumably beyond her reproductive years by then.)
As the 20th century accelerated towards its close the dangers came thicker and faster. Fluoridation. DDT. Alar. Population explosion and mass starvation. “Nucl’ar combat, toe to toe with the Roosskies.” New Ice Age. Radon in the basement. And the climactic Y2K.
A gauntlet of doom such as only a congress of imps, or a video game designer, could have devised. And yet – here we are.
As my brain-cell count declines gracefully toward the minimum needed to remember to take the next breath, I’m thinking it’s high time to start conserving my mental energies by limiting how much I worry about things. For a start, I’ve tossed global warming right out. As far as I can tell, and the written historical record will bear me out on this, we’ve always never had weather like this before. So I plan to focus either on rogue asteroids crashing into the Earth or on transfats. But how to decide?
Asteroid or transfats? Transfats or asteroids? Don’t even talk to me about bird flu. I’ve got my own problem.
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Sometime in the very early 1950s my family made a car trip from California to Missouri, and I’m guessing that we took Route 66, “the highway that’s the best.” My father drove right though the first night, and very early in the morning, before dawn, I remember hearing a voice on the radio talking about an imminent test of an atomic bomb at Yucca Flats, Nevada. As we listened to the countdown, I looked out my window to the left – north – and at “zero” I saw a glow rise up over the distant mountains. I’d seen them on television, for in those days A-bomb tests were novelties and perfect stuff for the relatively new technology of live coast-to-coast broadcast, but this was my first live one. In a way I wish I could say that I recall feeling a chill or something of the sort, but I didn’t. I was six or seven, and it was just a thing that happened.
In those days one heard a great deal of talk to the effect that “We never had weather like this before they started exploding those things.” The notion was common enough to become a punch line for comics. I have no memory of what sort of weather it was that needed explanation, but whatever it was we seem to have come through it. As we usually do.
Then there was the strontium-90 in the milk. Or maybe it wasn’t in the milk yet but was threatened; I’m not entirely sure. But however it may have been, I went to school each day, and at lunchtime I stood in line for my turn to put two cents into a slot in the milk machine and then slide the little bottle along a channel to the place where you could pull it out. I wasn’t supposed to get chocolate milk, my mother said, but I did sometimes. It could be that the chocolate offset the strontium-90, if there was any. In any case, I didn’t get radiation poisoning, nor did any of my classmates, not even the ones who dutifully drank white milk every day.
In high school I survived the Great Cranberry Panic of ’59. Thanksgiving came and went that year, as always, and hardly anybody died on account of it, apart from those who may have choked on a turkey bone.
You’ll notice that I have passed over the more commonplace childhood perils – swallowing a watermelon seed, for example, or stepping on a crack in the sidewalk. Those were simply the everyday dangers that all children learned to cope with, or else. A sociobiologist would see the hand of natural selection in them. (Well, not the sidewalk crack one, I guess, for the threat was to your grandmother, who was presumably beyond her reproductive years by then.)
As the 20th century accelerated towards its close the dangers came thicker and faster. Fluoridation. DDT. Alar. Population explosion and mass starvation. “Nucl’ar combat, toe to toe with the Roosskies.” New Ice Age. Radon in the basement. And the climactic Y2K.
A gauntlet of doom such as only a congress of imps, or a video game designer, could have devised. And yet – here we are.
As my brain-cell count declines gracefully toward the minimum needed to remember to take the next breath, I’m thinking it’s high time to start conserving my mental energies by limiting how much I worry about things. For a start, I’ve tossed global warming right out. As far as I can tell, and the written historical record will bear me out on this, we’ve always never had weather like this before. So I plan to focus either on rogue asteroids crashing into the Earth or on transfats. But how to decide?
Asteroid or transfats? Transfats or asteroids? Don’t even talk to me about bird flu. I’ve got my own problem.