Cliffs

We've been hearing a lot about cliffs lately. That's good. We need cliffs, otherwise life is too mundane. As a culture, we always manage to have a cliff or two down the road. We like to have precipitous cliffs that are just around the corner as well as distant cliffs that we can worry about from time to time.

Today two precipitous cliffs loom, the Mayan End-Of-Days Cliff and the Fiscal Cliff. It is interesting to note that if we fall off the former we won't need to worry about the latter. The Mayan Cliff has us scheduled for departure this Friday, December 21st. Some people are very worried about that. In fact, some are so worried they talk of committing suicide before that day to avoid it, a sort of a sub-cliff to the main cliff. I guess one cliff isn't enough for some people.

But if we survive the Mayan Cliff, we can all worry about the Fiscal Cliff which is due to arrive with the New Year. And every once in a while we can think about the Global Warming Cliff and worry about that.

Our last cliff of any size was the Y2K Cliff at the turn of the century. People worried that computer systems would malfunction when the year ratcheted around to 1/1/2000, that missile systems would go off, bank vaults would open, trains would crash into one another, and so on. None of that happened. But it wasn't long before the doomsayers adjusted the prophecies forward another five years. We needed to have a cliff.

Marq De Villiers wrote a book titled The End. In it he points out that our culture has adopted doomsday as a state of mind, that nowadays we don't turn a hair at the thought of an asteroid strike or a nuclear winter. Just another cliff. He writes of all the natural close calls our earth has survived already, the crashing and churning and smacking and burning of our globe from forces beyond and within. He speaks of the hazards to come. We are unlikely to run out of cliffs any time soon.
He writes of the need to come together politically as a global community to prevent approaching cliffs when we can and plan for those cliffs we cannot avoid.

But this is unlikely to happen, because we are fascinated by cliffs. We are mesmerized by them like a bird transfixed by the gaze of a cobra. We want to walk to the edge and look over it.

I believe we will survive the Mayan Cliff and the Fiscal Cliff. And many other cliffs to come. But we are a vulnerable species. As de Villiers points out, the planet will still be here after the ice melts and water rises and the violent storms wreak their havoc and life will survive as well, in some form. Just not our form.