It could be a plot for a dystopic science fiction novel; the great solar eclipse that will affect a small swath of central USA this very afternoon, lasting a mere three and a half minutes; this relatively simple obstruction of the sunlight by the moon in a perfect match up, that happens at various places on Earth with some regularity. And yet…
Doomsday predictions…
after all, just days ago the Statue of Liberty was struck on the torch by a bolt of lightning, captured on film. And then New York experienced an earthquake. And then social media lit up with reports that the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be firing up a massive experiment at the same moment, potentially ripping the very fabric of space and time and creating a massive vortex allowing inter-dimensional beings to come and wipe us out, or a giant black hole that will suck the Earth itself.
And those are the tame theories. Include the government planning a massive power grid failure forcing martial law and FEMA camps upon us. An invasion by China that has been sending more balloons across the skies. Or worse, our alien overlords, apparently lizard people, returning to enslave us, and possibly eat us, although that would not be healthy for them with our current state of pollutants.
I have experienced a few solar eclipses in my life, the result of being in different places. One time in Australia, the world turned dark for about the same amount of time. Back then, I thought, as I do now, the implications of that darkness, and I realized it had a name: Nighttime! If you want darkness, go out at night. Clouds block sunlight, but we don’t melt down over that.
Just be glad it is not an asteroid… wait, it isn’t an asteroid, right?
With all the imaginative fears resonating, somewhat like the Y2K bug that threatened all computers of the world one minute after 11:59 pm, December 31, 1999, I suspect it will be a giant letdown four minutes after the light begins to dim, and only for those people in the path of the totality.
This all comes to pass in a few hours from the time I post this. Most of you will read this after the fact and, hopefully, have a chuckle. If you are not being devoured by those inter-dimensional beings, that is.
~William Gensburger
Image from AI
