...and i feel fine

So, I turn on my computer this morning and the headlines read something like this:
"Hundreds dead in China quake"
"India cyclone kills 31"
"Iceland evacuates hundreds as volcano erupts again"
All in a row - just like that.



Are we experiencing the beginning of the end? Is the earth finally telling its inhabitants that it's fed up and we need to find someplace new? Are those damned ancient Mayans right?

I highly doubt that the number of earthquakes and storms have increased that much. I have a feeling we're just hearing about them more often than we used to. We're in an age of sensationalistic "journalism" on a 24-hour basis that needs to fill up its time with something. (Maybe that's why Glenn Beck has his own show.) What better way to fill it up than with things that happen every day but sound absolutely horrible, so our attention is drawn to it like a train wreck.

Imagine what a field day the news networks would have had if they had been around in the days of the eruption of Krakatoa - now THAT was a bit of hell on earth. Or picture the nation-wide manhunt for John Wilkes Booth after Lincoln's assasination. (I picture it being something like watching OJ in the white Bronco.) Minute by minute updates and interviews with the neighbor of the cousin of a member of the audience in the theater that night who had an obstructed view of Booth jumping onto the stage and maybe out a door somewhere...

But, I digress...I don't see natural everyday disasters as the prediction of our demise. Now, if the Holy See started giving all of its money away to third world nations to promote the use of condoms, I might just take that as a sure sign.