This is an excerpt from an article written in 1998 by a former speechwriter for Reagan and Bush Sr.:

Our entertainment industry, interestingly enough, has plucked something from the unconscious of a small collective. For about 30 years now, but accelerating quickly, the industry has been telling us about The Big Terrible Thing. Space aliens come and scare us, nuts with nukes try to blow us up.

This is not new: in the 1950s Michael Rennie came from space to tell us in The Day the Earth Stood Still that if we don’t become more peaceful, our planet will be obliterated. But now in movies the monsters aren’t coming close, they’re hitting us directly. Meteors the size of Texas come down and take out the eastern seaboard, volcanoes swallow Los Angeles, Martians blow up the White House. The biggest grosser of all time was about the end of a world, the catastrophic sinking of an unsinkable entity.

Something’s up. And deep down, where the body meets the soul, we are fearful. We fear, down so deep it hasn’t even risen to the point of articulation, that with all our comforts and amusements, with all our toys and bells and whistles . . . we wonder if what we really have is . . . a first-class stateroom on the Titanic. Everything’s wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it.

I don’t mean “Uh-oh, there’s a depression coming”, I mean “We live in a world of three billion men and hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, missiles, warheads; it’s a world of extraordinary germs that can be harnessed and used to kill whole populations, a world of extraordinary chemicals that can be harnessed and used to do the same.”

Three billion men, and it takes only half a dozen bright and evil ones to harness and deploy.

What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: what are the odds it will not? Low. Non-existent, I think.

When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage . . . when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries . . . who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense, ten-mile-long island called Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the city that is the psychological centre of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hardshouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.

If someone does the big, terrible thing to New York or Washington, there will be a lot of chaos and a lot of lines going down, a lot of damage, and a lot of things won’t be working so well any more. And thus a lot more . . . time. Something tells me we won’t be teleconferencing and faxing about the Ford account for a while.

The psychic blow — and that is what it will be as people absorb it, a blow, an insult that reorders and changes — will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for longer than a while. Something tells me more of us will be praying, and hard, one side-benefit of which is that there is sometimes a quality of stopped time when you pray. You get outside time.

Maybe, of course, I’m wrong. But I think of the friend who lives on Park Avenue who turned to me once and said, out of nowhere: “If ever something bad is going to happen to the city, I pray each day that God will give me a sign. That He will let me see a rat stand up on the sidewalk. So I’ll know to gather the kids and go.” I absorbed this and, two years later, just a month ago, poured out my fears to a former high official of the United States Government. His face turned grim. I apologised for being morbid. He said no, he thinks the same thing. He thinks it will happen in the next year and a half. I was surprised, and more surprised when he said that an acquaintance, a former arms expert for another country, thinks that it will happen in a matter of months.

So now I have frightened you. But we must not sit around and be depressed. “Don’t cry,” Jimmy Cagney once said. “There’s enough water in the goulash already.”

We must take the time to do some things. We must press government officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen tomorrow; they just haven’t focused on it because there’s no Armageddon constituency. We should press for more from our foreign intelligence and defence systems, and press local, state and federal leaders to become more serious about civil defence and emergency management.

The other thing we must do is the most important.

I once talked to a man who had a friend who had done something that took his breath away. She was single, middle-aged and middle class, and wanted to find a child to love. She searched the orphanages of South America and took the child who was in the most trouble, sick and emotionally unwell. She took the little girl home and loved her hard, and in time the little girl grew and became strong, became, in fact, the kind of person who could and did help others. Twelve years later, at the girl’s high-school graduation, she won the award for best all-round student. She played the piano for the recessional. Now she’s at college.

The man’s eyes grew moist. He had just been to the graduation. “These are the things that stay God’s hand,” he told me. I didn’t know what that meant. He explained: these are the things that keep God from letting us kill us all.

So be good. Do good. Stay His hand. And pray. When the Virgin Mary makes her visitations — she has never made so many in all of recorded history as she has in this century — she says: Pray! Pray unceasingly! I myself don’t, but I think about it a lot and sometimes pray when I think. But you don’t have to be Roman Catholic to take this advice. Pray. Unceasingly. Take the time.

The whole article is here: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,7-2001360468,00.html

-- FutureShock (gray@matter.think), October 16, 2001

Answers

That's a peach, FS. A bump for ya.

-- Rich (living_in_interesting_times@hotmail.com), October 16, 2001.

Can somebody make a link to this whole article. It doesn't work for me? Thanks!

-- Nerd (iamanerd@home.com), October 16, 2001.

Go to:

www.thetimes.co.uk

Near the bottom of the home page, under features, is the title "Under God's Hand". Click and read.

-- FutureShock (gray@matter.think), October 16, 2001.

Thanks, FS, for a fine article. I am sorry you chose to put it under "A chilling read...". Somehow, that misses the right tone.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), October 16, 2001.

Nipper:

I can only describe how I felt reading it. Maybe I should have titled it "Harbingers are us".

Or maybe "Foreshadowing-The Art of 'I told you so'"

-- FutureShock (gray@matter.think), October 16, 2001.

the DARKEST hour is just before DAWN!!

YES THERE IS COMING ON THIS WORLD''A TIME OF TROUBLE''SUCH AS THE WORLD HAS NEVER KNOW'' ''AS IN THE DAY'S OF NOAH'' ''THE GREAT & TERRIBLE DAY OF THE LORD'' ''ARMAGEDDON''and many many more PROPHECIES) BUT=FOR THOSE THAT ARE LOOKING,FOR HIS RETURN WE KNOW=(THE END OF THE STORY)for some it seem's doom&Gloom.

but for those that have accepted HIS gift of eternal-life[in] CHRIST.

IT IS THE BEGINNING!!!!

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), October 16, 2001.

Forecasts of doom have been around since man achieved consciousness. One hundred years ago there were always a few guys in every city that wore sandwich boards that proclaimed "Repent ye sinners, the End is near".

Much shit has gone down in the last 100 years, but the End has not occurred. The guys who manufactured sandwich boards made a few bucks. Many others died in wars and natural disasters but the End did not occur.

One day, the lights will truly go out. The End of all human life will indeed occur. And the Universe will not even blink. In the meantime, life goes on. Live it. If there is any purpose to our lives it is to live them.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), October 16, 2001.

Lars:

I did not post this for the prediction of doom. I for one do not fall for FUD. What struck me about this article was the reference to the collective consciousness of Americans foreshadowing an even as large as 9/11/01. There have been many more huge disaster films in the last decade than any other time in the history of film.

-- FutureShock (gray@matter.think), October 16, 2001.

I,m not a doomer gloomer,but a Believer in an END too sin & sorrow!!!

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), October 17, 2001.

FS--

Yeah, I know you are not peddling doom. I was just observing that the End of Days POV has been around for a while, like as long as mankind. What was the first line of A Tale of Two Cities? I wonder what the ignorant European peasants of the 14th century thought about the Bubonic plague? Sheesh, it had to be the punishment of a wrathful God.

For that matter, how did Americans and Russians endure 40 years of living with 10000 nukes aimed at them. I sure feel better now that it's down to 5000 (or whatever).

We live in perilous times. We have always lived in perilous times. If we are more aware of it now, maybe that is good. Maybe.

That asteroid thing bugs me now and then.

Al-D, how do you account for an End of Days scenario that depends entirely upon an "Act of God"?

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), October 17, 2001.