THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

 

A band of murderous monkeys on a rock circling one of these stars say, “We must be the reason for all of this,” shortly after the monkeys blow themselves up.

 

In the beginning…

During the Second World War, a young woman working at a defense plant in Memphis, Tennessee, and a few of her girlfriends decided to spend a weekend at Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  

At the same time, a young, married army captain from Georgia, stationed in Arkansas, decided to spend a weekend at Mardi Gras. 

Among thousands of people celebrating, these two people happened to meet.  Liquor was flowing, hormones were firing, and the woman consented to sex.   He did not use a condom; he did not pull out; it didn’t end in a hand job or a blow job; hundreds of millions of sperm were ejaculated; by sheer coincidence, the woman had released an egg.    One particular sperm out of hundreds of millions fertilized the egg, and I was conceived.  

There is a better chance of a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a storm in the Atlantic Ocean than of me being conceived. 

 

The young unmarried woman did not have a miscarriage; for whatever reason, not religious, she did not have an abortion; and I was born; a singular addition to the two-billion-human population of the earth at that time; an addition to a race of violent bipedal apes with just six degrees of separation from their cousins, the chimpanzees.

 

The war-like nature and propensity for violence of homo sapiens can be documented from its very beginning.   There is not a time in recorded history when men somewhere were not at war, killing each other; churches burning heretics and witches; people tortured and executed over political differences…

Just in my lifetime: the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the Iran War, and any number of skirmishes in the name of U.S. security. 

Then:

It was a spectacle to be witnessed; men on horseback, families in wagons bringing fried chicken and picnic trimmings, spreading blankets on the courthouse lawn, to witness the hanging of black men in Rolling Fork, Mississippi; so my grandmother, who was born in the nineteenth century, recounted.

Later:

George W. Bush lets the assault weapons ban expire… Twenty children, six- and seven-year-olds, and six adults died at Sandy Hook Elementary School – we said ‘thoughts and prayers’ and moved on.

This is who we are.

I am an old man now and have seen almost a century of human foolishness, greed and violence.   We are great apes with a veneer of civilization to hide our natural propensity for violence, which I believe will be the apocalyptic we so often prognosticate.

Pump that oil, don’t worry about climate change; build those data centers and don’t sweat AI. 

There are approximately 12,187 nuclear warheads scattered across the Earth, the equivalent of 6,000 megatons or 6,000,000,000 tons of TNT. 

The weaponized equivalent of six billion tons, or twelve trillion pounds of TNT, is in the hands of bipedal monkeys, at the whim of a handful of old men with a propensity for violence.

At the end…

the OL'Buzzard  

How big is a trillion?   If you tap the table once every second, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, with no breaks, it would take you thirty-two thousand years to tap out one trillion...