Millennium

                                                                     

Maybe this world is another planets hell.

                                                            Aldous Huxley

You’re born . You suffer. You die. Fortunately there’s a loophole.

                                                                                   Billy Graham

 

Prepare to meet your maker, pilgrims. The end is near. At least that’s what a growing number of folks would have us think. You see, the term ‘millennium’ refers not simply to a unit of time--1000 years--but also to a biblical prophecy interpreted by some to mean Jesus will appear, followed by Armageddon. Now Armageddon is not a Hollywood blockbuster starring Harrison Ford, but a actual battle between good & evil which will result in Christ’s’ 1000 year reign. More & more folks are getting real ancy about this, resulting in various groups getting together for poison kool-aid parties or just welcome back Jesus bashes like the large group of ‘end-timers’ that gathered at the Denver Sheraton this summer.

This group of 2000 prayed, chanted & blew on rams horns for 4 days convinced Jesus would show & that would be the end of that. He didn’t show, as you may know, & the end timers went home replaced by a John Deere Sales Convention.

  The ‘End Timers’ were not the first however, & as we look back over history we find other groups getting jumpy at various times for no apparent reason. In 1260 a plague of ‘Locusts from the Bottomless Pit’ was forecast....didn’t happen. In 990 the ‘Weeping Warriors’ movement predicted the end.

 In 1843 the Second Coming was predicted, followed by “the Great Disappointment’ when that didn’t pan out. Other doomsday prophecies incorporate notions of economic ruin...something we’re experiancing right now as the Hong Kong Stock market plunges & drags the worlds markets with it. Perhaps now is the time to get out of the stock market..or out of currency alltogeather...go live in a cave...

  Then there’s the Bible’s & other’s predictions of, “the Antichrist arising from Eastern Europe.” Could that be the pesky Saddam?

 Perhaps our infatuation with the millennium is simply as Stephen Gould, Professor of Geology, Harvard states “our love of order in the irregularities of the universe. In the chaos of a confusing world numerical regularity such as the year 2000 gives us a feeling of having some control.”

 I personally was not losing much sleep over the end of the earth happening Jan 1 2000 as I have car payments to GMAC that go far beyond that. An outfit like GMAC simply would not have made such a mistake.

 Then I read something that sent shivers up my timbers & froze my assets.

 

 Kirsty Duncan IS about to end the world.

 Kirsty Duncan, described as a ‘charismatic young Canadian geographer,’ has recently led a team of scientists to a small island in the Svalbard archipelago 720 miles below the arctic circle, to survey the grave sites of 7 young Norwegian miners who in 1918 died of the Spanish Flu. She will return in a year, (the early part of 1999), to unearth the corpses.

 The Spanish Flu in one year killed 40 million people you’ll remember.

 40 million. There is no known cure.

 Kirsty & her team, (pay attention here now) hope the remote frozen location has preserved the virus & that they can bring it back to life, then find a cure.

 

 Now I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but it seems to me that at this time, close to the millennium, the forecast Apocalypse & all, this is no time to be unearthing the most devastating plague the earth has ever seen.

   Now the Black Death killed 40 million Europeans, but took 150 years to do it.

 The Spanish Flu killed that many in 12 months, world wide. 675,000 Americans died, 90,000 people in the Philippines, 20 million in India. The entire world was infected.

 In Atlanta, public gatherings were prohibited. In San Francisco, the entire population was required to wear surgical masks. In New York, people got on subways & died before they reached their stop. The toll was so great in America alone it reduced average life expectancy by 13 years. It changed history.

 The Spanish Flu killed in days, it’s preferred victims were not the young & old, the usual victims of infectious diseases, but those in their 20’s. And it killed horribly, triggering a massive immune reaction that filled the lungs with blood causing the victim to drown from within. Stricken people’s appearance changed from white to black in two hours, the symptoms were more like Ebola than Flu.

 One has to wonder at this point just what’s up with those crazy Canuks. Are they really that bored up there? Have the northern lights fried their brains? All the signs say if there ever was a good time to unearth the worlds worst plague, this aint it. So just why is Kirsty Duncan doing this?

 The influenza virus mutates every few years. Kirsty believes this Spanish Flu virus could tell us why. The 30 year old Ph.D. who teaches climatology at one of Canada’s two universities has this to say: “My interest is in how climate change affects disease. I’ve done work on plague & malaria & the connection between global warming & Lyme disease.” (right away we realize this is not a woman you’d want to share a toothbrush with).   “I was interested in the seasonality of the flu. Then I read a book on the Spanish Flu & was amazed & horrified.”  Apparently not horrified enough as she came home & told her husband, “I will find a cure for this disease.”

 For the next four years she researched death records. She needed a site where victims died quickly & were chilled immediately, as the flu virus breaks down swiftly after death. Finally she located just the right combinations in the graveyard of the company coal town in Longyearbyen Norway. It took another two years to get permission to dig up the frozen miners. Now the papers are in order, & Kirsty will commence to dig...in the year 1999.

 What she may un-earth there in the last year of the Millenium may well be “Locusts From The Bottomless Pit’.

 

Had your Flu shot?