While most of us watched transfixed when the Times Square Ball dropped as the clock struck midnight, like the misanthrope watching a horror movie I couldn’t take my eyes off another timepiece.
This clock, the Doomsday Clock, rather than heralding in the new year, represents how long humanity will survive as depicted by the 12 hours on a clock face. Midnight represents the end of civilization or the apocalypse.
For 2019, as in 2018, it was set at 11:58 p.m., two minutes from midnight. The time for 2020 will be set on Jan. 23.
The Doomsday Clock, the brainchild of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, has been accepted as a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe since 1947. The clock evaluates all risks, including nuclear dangers, climate change and emerging technologies.
The Bulletin points out reckless language in the nuclear realm, which has heated up an already dangerous situation. It is clear we are on the cusp of a new arms race, increasing the likelihood of accidents and misperceptions, while at the same time robbing resources from life-affirming objectives – like fixing our infrastructure, raising the minimum wage and getting everyone health insurance.
The last time the clock was set this close to doomsday was in 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union tested their first thermonuclear weapons. I was 8 years old, practicing duck-and-cover under my desk in Northwood Grammar School. A nuclear attack seemed so imminent, I pleaded with my father to build us a bomb shelter.
Oh, how times have changed.
Today, we appear unfazed by the threat of nuclear war, held in thrall as we are by social media and shopping on Amazon. Worst of all, as opposed to when I was 8, now new existential dangers lurk.
The Atomic Bulletin warns us that the world has entered a prolonged period of extreme instability – a situation where the caustic political environment, coupled with an acceleration of disinformation and cyber-warfare, puts civilization on an unsustainable path.
And that’s not to mention climate change, that 800-pound gorilla just now slouching out of the shadows into plain view. Paul Krugman puts it this way: “While it will take generations for the full consequences of climate change to play out, there will be many localized, temporary disasters along the way. Apocalypse will become the new normal” – like what is happening right now in Australia.
Somehow, I survived grammar school without getting ulcers and our world didn’t disappear in a mushroom cloud. I realize that things were simpler in the 1950s, but what happened then provides a blueprint for a way forward today.
I believe it was not just a lucky accident that we didn’t blow ourselves up back then. Rather, it was because regular people got fed up and demanded change.
At the height of the Cold War, about 50,000 women brought together by “Women Strike for Peace” marched in 60 cities to demonstrate against nuclear weapons. A robust movement to save the environment arose, spurred by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. These causes merged with burgeoning feminist and civil rights and anti-war movements to form the 1960s counterculture.
I believe that when we were young, our sixties generation, standing up together for a cause bigger than ourselves – or our pocketbooks – changed history, at least for a while, striking a blow for peaceful co-existence, universal human rights and protecting our precious little spaceship Earth.
It is time to do it again.
And, once again, it will be the young who will inspire us and lead the way. Young people like 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, speaking truth to power at the 2019 Climate Action Summit: “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Go, girl, go!
(Jean Stimmell is a semi-retired psychotherapist living with the two women in his life, Russet the artist and Coco the Plott hound, in Northwood. He blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.)