Ending and Beginning

Change is always happening; all that changes is the rate of change. We live in a world today that is different from the world of a decade or year or month ago.

So when we talk about the TEOTWAWKI, we’re talking about dramatic changes to the world that make us realize change has occurred, that things are not the way they used to be. For most of us over 50, comparing our lives and the world today to our lives and the world of our childhood, it’s already the end of the world as we knew it. If we could somehow compare those two editions of the world side by side, the changes would be dramatic.

But for most of us, TEOTWAWKI means dramatic changes in a short period of time — the changes of the last 40 or 50 years, for example, compressed into 5 or fewer years. And I don’t know if that will ever happen. It may be that the truly dramatic changes most of us expect in the near future will never reach the critical level to shock people into calling the end of the world as we know it.

I think for most of us, the end result of most of the changes happening in the world today will be a return to ordinary human poverty. There will probably not be any cataclysmic world-wide events that will release the zombies, it will be more like a gradual, uneven slide down into the poverty that has characterized most of human existence. And if it’s gradual enough, we may not even recognize what’s happening. The wealth of the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be nothing more than a distant memory — for most, a myth.

This entry was posted on 18 October 2009 at 8:02 am and is filed under TEOTWAWKI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.