In what was once a quiet hamlet in rural England,
the dead are being carted through the muddy streets. Inside one particular dwelling, a
man lies on his back, delirious from the effects of a very high fever. He struggles to breathe...
sounds emanate from him that can only be described as death rattles. Suddenly he vomits blood
onto the floor, the motion exposing what look like egg-sized bubos covering his body. He
will be dead within a day or two, as will his wife and his three children... As will
his best friend and neighbors…as will most of the people in the surrounding areas. What
we are talking about is the Black Death, a disease so virulent and deadly, to some it
looked like the world would end. Black Death
You can easily imagine why folks in parts of rural England in the 1300s must have thought
that this killer pestilence was the end of the world.
Around 90 percent of people back then lived in small rural communities, and the Black
Death in some cases wiped out the entire community. As one chronicler put it, parts the countryside
were: “quite void of inhabitants so that there were almost none left alive.”
Can you imagine what it must have been like? No one knew what was coming. The Black Death
– actually not called the Black Death back then – was a bubonic plague that entered
England from the south and made its way through the country at a frightening speed. It wasn’t
as if these rural communities had much warning. Word didn’t travel too fast, back in 1348.
Some of those small villages, perhaps with populations of up to 500, were completely
depopulated. In the larger towns, and certainly London, some people had been hearing rumors
about a terrifying pestilence that had been sweeping through Europe, but the rural folks
didn’t know what was coming. This is how another chronicler put it when
talking about one particular place: “Almost the whole strength of the town perished.”
In other towns there weren’t enough people living to bury the dead.
The plague then traveled farther north, with one bishop writing at the time that he saw
no one from one town, because “they were all dead.” It travelled to Scotland, too,
a country at the time that had been warring with England.
Scottish soldiers had said the disease was God taking vengeance on the evil English,
but those soldiers carried it home to Scotland. The plague was an equal opportunist, and it
killed the Scottish with a similar ferocity. One Scottish chronicler later wrote in 1384,
“So great a plague has never been heard of from the beginning of the world to the
present day, or been recorded in books.” Estimates vary, but it’s thought in England
alone the Black Death killed 40 to 60 percent of the population. It killed something like
30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population, and so you can imagine that at the time people
might have wondered if this was not the end of the world.
Plagues in general We’re not going to go through every plague
that must have made people wonder if humans didn’t have long left, but we’ll mention
a couple. You have the “Plague of Athens”, that
lasted from 430 to 426 BC. No one is exactly sure what the disease was, but it killed over
a quarter of the population of Athens and it killed those it affected very quickly.
That was in some ways good news, because hosts died so fast they couldn’t spread it around
too much. Then there was the “Plague of Justinian”,
which lasted from 541 to 750. This was certainly a bubonic plague, which relates to those swollen
lymph nodes we talked about that look like tumors. The name for this kind of swollen
lymph node was a buboe, hence, bubonic plague. During the time it ravaged Europe, it took
with it half of the population there. People might well have thought, will this thing ever
stop...will it kill us all. The “Great Plague of London” that lasted
from 1665 to 1666 killed around 100,000 people, but that was actually around 20 percent of
the people that lived there. While Londoners back then may not have thought the world was
going to end, they would have certainly wondered just how bad things could get.
Cuban Missile Crisis During the “Cold War” when the Soviet
Union and the USA were creating stockpiles of nuclear weapons, there was always an overhanging
fear that someone might just press the button and an all-out nuclear war would take place.
With it possibly ending humanity. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, people were always
a little concerned that nuclear war could happen, mainly because the TV kept showing
them infomercials about what to do in the event of such a war. Those programs were damn
scary, too...if not a bit ridiculous at times. We’re not sure the “Duck and Cover”
technique would have saved someone from a nuclear bomb, but the ads certainly put the
fear of God in people. It was in the 1960s when things really came
to a head. By the way, there have been a bunch of what are called “close calls”, but
this was the closest. From October 16 to October 28 in the year
of 1962 there was a stand-off between the Soviets and the Americans. It’s a long story,
but let’s just say that the USA had prior to ‘62 watched as Fidel Castro’s revolutionary
army turned over a Cuban dictatorship and introduced a revolutionary socialist state.
Well, that really upset the Americans, who certainly didn’t want Cuba getting into
bed with Soviet Communists. That happened anyway, much to the chagrin
of the U.S. In 1961, the Americans secretly directed an invasion of Cuba led by Cuban
rebels, and this became known as the “Bay of Pigs” invasion. It didn’t work... is
the short explanation. After the invasion, Castro got in touch with
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Together they agreed to construct ballistic missile
launch facilities in Cuba, sites that weren’t that far from the USA. The U.S. already had
launch sites in Europe, that weren't that far from Russia.
When the U.S found out about the Cuban facilities, you could say the White House and Pentagon
weren’t exactly happy about it. The U.S. demanded that the facilities be taken
down and the missiles sent back to Russia. Knowing that the Americans had launch sites
in Europe, Khrushchev said he “wanted to level the playing field”, and so if the
U.S. decided to attack them, what would now happen was “mutually assured destruction.”
The very apt abbreviation and acronym of that is M. A. D, or MAD.
What you might not know is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Department of Defense
wanted to just go ahead with a full scale attack on Cuba, thinking the Soviets wouldn’t
fight back. The missile sites soon became known to the
public, and people started getting scared. If you were around in those times, you would
have seen President John F. Kennedy on the TV speaking to the nation, and his words were:
“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba
against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United
States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
Damn, people might have thought, are they really going to do this?
Things heated up more, and then a Soviet spy said it seemed war was imminent and asked
U.S. officials if some kind of agreement could be made, rather than a nuclear war kill, many,
many people. Meanwhile, the U.S. military's top brass were
still pushing for an all-out attack on Cuba. Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy, discussing how
they had made a “tight knot” of tension and it needed to be untightened.
He wrote: “If there is no intention to tighten that
knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let
us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to
untie that knot. We are ready for this.” There’s much more to the story, but in the
end Kennedy agreed to remove missile launch sites from Italy and Turkey and not invade
Cuba, only if the Soviets dismantled their launch sites in Cuba.
Diplomacy won in the end, but we weren’t so far from nuclear war. How would that have
gone down? Some years later an American political scientist
wrote, “The US air strike and invasion that were scheduled for the third week of the confrontation
would likely have triggered a nuclear response against American ships and troops, and perhaps
even Miami. The resulting war might have led to the deaths of over 100 million Americans
and over 100 million Russians.” Maybe that’s not the end of the world, but
what would have happened after that? December 21, 2012
Now for something completely different and even a bit silly. We say silly, but polls
at the time revealed that 10 percent of those interviewed thought the world would end on
this day. You might ask, what was so special about December
21, 2012? Why not June 6th, 2007, at 4.26 pm, starting with an exploding sausage factory
somewhere outside Lyon in France…. That made about as much sense.
This was what you might call a Doomsday scenario. It involved a large number of very misguided
and misinformed people who thought the end of civilisation was imminent. It was going
to end that day, because, they said, this was the day the Maya calendar ended. It had
run out spaces, so to speak, and they said there wasn’t another edition.
This was complete balderdash, to use a word we think people should use much more frequently
because it sounds so cool. The calendar didn’t end at all, and any
expert on Maya culture could have told those 10 percenters that... but they weren’t listening.
They were prepping instead, and busy writing horrible things about so-called Mayan apocalypse
deniers. Some people around the world actually had
one last big party on December 20th. Strangers let their hair down and made love in the streets.
Some sat quietly at home, burning incense sticks while listening to One Direction's
“Take Me Home.” Others were less accepting of death, and photos
emerged online of them down in their bunkers with all the food they’d hoarded…only
for the sun to come up the next day and leave them wondering what they were going to do
with 300 boxes of Mac and Cheese. Weirdly, people in the city of Merida in Mexico,
the place where you’d have found lots of Mayans, were just going about their business
as usual. It turned out that one loon had misread some
Maya text and another loon shared that loon’s prophecy. The rest was history. We found out
then that in the age of the Internet and social media, a person can read an alleged holy inscription
on a Dorito, and soon they’ll have a madding crowd of followers.
The followers of this theory didn’t bother reading the words of one of the world’s
leading Mayan and Meso-American specialists, a man who said, “No Maya text – ancient,
colonial or modern – ever predicted the end of time or the end of the world.”
Y2K On the stroke of midnight, when the year was
January 1st, 2000, some people were hunkering down waiting for the apocalypse to happen.
This time it wasn’t about ancient theories, but modern technology.
The theory was that something called the “Millennium Bug” would wreak havoc in our highly digitalized
world. There actually was a slight problem, in that coders in the early days would not
write something like 1997, they just put 97, because that saved space.
But what would happen when 2000 came along, would 00 actually mean 1900? Would this bug
then shutdown or mess up certain computer systems? Some people thought it would.
What had to be done was a lot of coding to fix the problem, but for some reason people
thought computer systems all over the world would just freak out. They saw a doomsday
scenario, with nuclear power plants the world over exploding…missiles going off, banking
systems breaking down, etc, etc. It would take us back to the dark ages...or something
like that. One woman in the U.S saw this happening and
had started hoarding early. She told the press, “If something happens and I didn’t prepare
my family, I couldn’t live with myself.” She even kept her hoarding of goods secret
from her friends and neighbors, believing when the lights went out the unprepared would
hit the streets in mobs and take what they wanted.
There were some hitches in some systems, but all in all, the day after 2000 was just like
any other day, other than the fact a lot of people had huge hangovers.
Next Year? Ok, so we’ll finish this with a prediction
for 2021. That is the predication of an American pastor of the Mariners Church. He’s got
“The Rapture” checked on his Google calendar for sometime in 2021. That’s kind of like
“The Leftovers” show, where a bunch of people just go missing.
In this case, it will be the Christian believers who get hoovered up to the heavens and the
rest of the non-believers, or people of any other religion we imagine, will have to stay
down on Earth and eke out a living amongst floods, plagues, earthquakes... and the “Great
Toilet Roll Wars.”...We added that one. Before you start getting worried, remember
that the Earth has been experiencing floods, earthquakes and plagues for a long time, and
they are not going to go away. Anyway, we’ll see next year if a bunch of folks just disappear
into the heavens. Just to let you know how long things have
been happening down here on Earth, and to answer a question you all want answered, watch
this video, “Why Do You Even Exist?” If that’s a bit heavy right now, have a look
at this instead….
