Two-and-Half Minutes to Midnight
By Albert B. Kelly
It was something easily missed. Coming off the election in
November, with our attention on the holidays and then the start of the New Year,
few noticed that the Doomsday Clock was adjusted forward so that now we stand
precisely two-and-half clicks from midnight.
If you’re not familiar with the Doomsday Clock, it is a
symbolic clock that was invented in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at
the dawn of the atomic age as a way to measure and reflect the reality of
living in a world where we possess the power to destroy the world and every
last thing in it.
The scientists- the ones that worked on the Manhattan
Project which produced the bombs that we ultimately dropped Hiroshima and
Nagasaki- believed that mankind had crossed some type of threshold when we
unlocked those atomic secrets.
My own guess is that it was not so much the splitting of the
atom and atomic power itself that led to the Doomsday Clock, but it was human
nature, it was what we did with the power and what we remain capable of doing with
it today.
So as we begin 2017, we’re just two-and-half clicks from
midnight- our own witching hour. For the record, “midnight” is supposed to
express the point at which we destroy our civilization with our technologies
and by our own hand according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
This is the closest we’ve been since 1953 when the thing was
exactly 2 minutes from midnight. Back then, the world had just digested the
fact that both the United States and the Soviet Union tested out the Hydrogen
bomb.
My guess for “closest” would have been the Cuban Missile
Crisis, but it turns out that the crisis was over and done with before the Scientists
met, so it wasn’t reflected on the clock.
With that as backdrop, you may be wondering what has
happened to move the clock to its closest point since 1953. According to Rachel
Bronson, the director of the Bulletin, it wasn’t one thing, but unease in the
air- something ominous just below the surface.
“This year’s Clock deliberations felt more urgent than
usual…as trusted sources of information came under attack, fake news was on the
rise, and words were used by a President-elect of the United States in cavalier
and often reckless ways to address the twin threats of nuclear weapons and
climate change, “said Ms. Bronson.
And lest we think it’s just a few scientists getting spooked
because Donald Trump won’t take nukes off
the table, consider that Silicon Valley CEO’s, Wall Street guys, and
other “elites” are buying up decommissioned missile silos and stocking up on
supplies “just in case”.
According to Evan Osnos in his New Yorker article entitle
“Survival of the Richest”, technology
Execs, hedge-fund managers, and other masters of the
universe are worried about not only Nukes and climate change, but also about
the rest of us grabbing pitchforks and coming after them.
Some call that “income equality” and others might call it
“social unrest”; both terms don’t do justice to the anger people feel as more
and more jobs are eliminated through technology by the west coast guys or sent
overseas for cheap foreign labor by the east coast guys.
I suppose I can’t blame them for the silos or buying land in
New Zealand. At some point folks will wake up and realize it’s not immigrants,
minorities, ethnic groups, or safety net programs that have hollowed out the
American dream, but guys whose only metrics are fat quarterly earnings and
stock prices.
Two-and-half minutes to midnight; instead of spending
gazillions of dollars on luxury silos and bunkers in New Zealand to ride out
the apocalypse, maybe investing in our schools, communities, and safety net
programs might be a smarter investment- if not a more righteous one.
Two-and-half minutes to midnight; the move forward on the
Doomsday Clock was largely because of rhetoric and anger and fear. Anger is
fine for a time, as is fear- so long as we don’t sacrifice too much in the name
of either.
With February comes Black History month and if that history
has anything to offer our present moment, its resilience and the ability to
remain hopeful in the face of a lot uncertainty and some very long
shadows.
If nothing else, it will help the angry to put away their
pitch forks and the scared to give up their silos.