End Of Days

I know that my son is especially sensitive to movies, TV shows and stories about the end of the world. He still flinches when "Battlestar Galactica" comes up in conversation, and even otherwise ridiculous and silly fare such as the Tommy Lee Jones opus "Volcano" can trigger deep-seated fear in him that echoes on for days after. The ersatz destruction of Los Angeles by a lava cone formed beneath the La Brea Tar Pits is a significant event in my son's life. Maybe this is because he grew up with September 11 as one of his first media memories. Maybe he is a very sensitive child. Maybe he is related to me.
As previously described here, I have long been perplexed by matters of life and death. I believe that I seek out visions of Armageddon. Somehow, for me, it is more comforting to think about the destruction of a city, state or planet than the loss of any individual. That explains my infatuation with the works of Stephen King. Uncle Stevie (as he is wont to call himself) has blown up the state of Maine more times than I can count, and has taken regular swipes at the country as a whole, when he is not eliminating human life as a whole. The thing that he figured out is that there is always hope for mankind if there is one witness. In books like "The Stand" and "Cell," he seems more intent on hitting the reset button for the planet. Once all those annoying idjits are wiped out via super-flu or the very cellular telephones that made us less human in the first place, then the good and virtuous among us can inherit the earth. Having grown up in Boulder, I felt a huge sense of relief and entitlement upon discovering that Stephen King made that city the base of operations for the good guys in "The Stand." Now that I live in California and own a cell phone, I'm worried.
But that's nothing new. I've been worried since I watched "The Day After" in the basement of my parents' basement back in 1983. I had written my own apocalyptic tale three years earlier for a creative writing class in high school. I was worried way back in 1970 when I saw Charlton Heston fall down on the ignition switch for the Doomsday Bomb in "Beneath The Planet Of The Apes." That one even gave me a date to anticipate: 3955. That's when the Alpha Omega device will be detonated by Colonel George Taylor. Of course, this does come about some time after mankind has reverted to a primitive state and the planet is being run by a race of super-intelligent apes, so maybe it won't be so bad.
But all of this is no solace for my son, so I decided instead to tell him about Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians. The idea that time is more like a map instead of an escalator seemed like a soothing notion back when I first read it. The world does end, as it always has, but there's nothing we can do about it, so why worry about it? Instead, we can choose those happy moments to relive and savor. So it goes. My son listened with some interest, and then returned to his Sunday comics. So it goes.
Paul Harvey is gone, and that's the end of the story.