Today's Word: Warn

Cassandra stood on the shore and whispered divine doom into her web microphone. She set the predictions to thumping beats and dropped in samples from 70s funk albums. The end of the world was remixed into an album.

It's funny (although it isn't) that we don't pay attention to climate change or extinction rates or depletion of natural resources, yet it seems everyone's eyebrows these days are raised about the End of Oil. And you know you've hit the big time when your We're Doomed meme hits a magazine whose cover features the offspring of rock and rollers.

I got suckered by the Y2K scare, but thankfully backed away from the edge six months before 2000, realizing that the doom-and-gloomers behind TEOTWAWKI were just a tad too gleeful about technology's end. It also helped to know people in the field. My cousin's husband did a lot of Y2K compliance for banks, and he was fairly confident about matters. I read up on reports about compliance measures around the world, following the teams that wrote patches and scripts to have older machines cope with the time change. But most of all, I shook myself of the notion of the world's ending. The world will go on, and humanity has been through worse. If anything about Y2K, people stocked up on extra food, water and supplies, which is practical sense. For a couple years, I lived in Houston, which joined in its Gulf Coast brethren every summer in preparing for hurricane season. Have a few blankets, extra food, water, batteries, and supplies to board up windows. When the winds kicked up, nails were nailed, radios were checked, and I made sure I had a couple extra books. The wind died down, the smell of the sea was in the air. The sun emerged, and Houston life returned to its balance of big hair, concrete and humidity.

It's easy to fall into a Mad Max mindset thinking about when the oil runs out, but then it was easy to imagine Mad Max in a Y2K world where the machines failed. I feel the same death-wish-for-civilization vibe on End of Oil as I did with Y2K. There's this eagerness to see what would happen if everything collapsed, if it all went to hell. In that felling, there's a pre-emptive sense of relief: The powerful will be brought low, we'll be finally out of the rat race, we could go back to farming and telling stories around the fire. It's these people who scare me far worse than the idea of giving up my car or living locally (I live next to a golf course, and man, I see acres of crops in my imagination). The Apocalypists crave the end, I think, because they are so disenfranchised in their station at life that a cataclysm would be a sort of cosmic "reset" button. Such thinking abandons the notion that humanity (when it has to) can be a very clever race, creating solutions to once-vexing puzzles. The Apocalypists want to give up, not solve the problem, not want to find a way out of the maze, which is contradicts thousands of years of human evolution. I can't hang with these people. Alarmism is never sexy or stylish. It's brutish and speaks little of science and rationalism. It gives in to the Calvinist notion of being tightly controlled and never questioning Old Testament dogma. It's a self-owning slavery.

Is the End of Oil something to worry about? Sure. But you either freak out about it, grab your guns, and head for the hills...or you can settle in and realize this is a test for humanity. All organisms adapt to survive, but man is the only one clever enough to figure a new solution. We have opposable thumbs, rationalism, and science.

Of course, it's articles like this that make me worry about what those solutions might be.