I used to think, back in the dark old days of the Reagan era, that human civilization would most likely end in an instant of nuclear fire, one brief flash of horrible beauty and destruction followed by eternal silence and ashes. After this morning’s commute, however, I’ve decided the end is going to come more slowly and far less spectacularly, in a prolonged struggle without end that fools us all into thinking we’re making progress and moving ahead, when in reality we’re just creeping our lives away inch by inch as we all slowly go mad.<\/p>\n
I’ve decided, in other words, that humanity’s end will come in one colossal traffic jam.<\/p>\n
I can see it all now… future archeologists from an alien civilization pondering the bizarre death rituals that would require each individual to be wrapped in a sarcophagus of steel and plastic and placed on a long ribbon of concrete running between our cities. Would they assume we wanted to keep our dead near us, above ground and in plain sight? Would they assume we shared some mythological vision of the dead traveling onward to our final destination? Perhaps the other seats within these sarcophagi were intended for symbolic passengers, or beings that we thought we’d pick up along the way. The scraps and crumbs littering the floor and control surfaces of the sarcophagi would surely be interpreted as symbolic meals to feed the travelers on their journey into the afterlife, while the various electronic devices plugged into the mummified ears of the deceased were perhaps intended to provide a way for the living to speak to the dead. I suspect these future scientists from another world will shake their heads at the sad superstitions that left we foolish humans so isolated, so wedded to the idea of perpetual motion despite the ironic fact that we really weren’t getting anywhere at all.<\/p>\n
Yes, I can see it all… and I think I’m going to take the train to work the rest of this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I used to think, back in the dark old days of the Reagan era, that human civilization would most likely end in an instant of nuclear fire, one brief flash of horrible beauty and destruction followed by eternal silence and ashes. After this morning’s commute, however, I’ve decided the end is going to come more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-old-man-throwing-rocks-at-the-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}