The world didn’t end Saturday, although the CDC-warned zombie apocalypse still looms large. From my column today in the New York Post:
. . . fear of the unknown and the uncertainty that tomorrow will actually come have always been part of the human condition. In an age of terrorism, of shoe bombers and explosives-laden vans in Times Square, what used to seem like paranoid fiction or good old Grand Guignol fun isn’t quite as funny any more.
That’s also why [Dr.] Khan’s blog post went viral — the top item on the agency’s Web site last week. This year alone, we’ve seen devastating tornadoes in the South, wildfires in Texas and now floods along the Mississippi River.
And that’s just in America. Japan and New Zealand are still digging out from major earthquakes; the Japanese have failed nuclear reactors to handle, too.
So the sky didn’t fall Saturday and the earth wasn’t rent asunder. Nor is granny about to develop a voracious appetite for human flesh. But the weather and our fellow man provide existential threats aplenty.
“You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency,” Khan wrote.
Add now poor Joplin, Mo., to that list, struck by a massive tornado after we closed the column but before it appeared. I’ve been to “the Town that Got the Lead Out” near the Kansas and Oklahoma borders, and it’s hard to imagine the devastation a twister that big can cause, nor a place less deserving of nature’s blind wrath.
But the first-person reports are heartrending, and a reminder that Dr. Khan was right. Rapture or no Rapture, we still know neither the day nor the hour.