Are The End Times Near?

By Rick Ruffin

Are we approaching the end of the world? That's what my cousin, a fundamentalist Christian, thinks. I think the same.

While she awaits the Rapture, I await pestilence, famine, nuclear annihilation and environmental collapse. I tell her that we need more scientists to solve all the world's problems. She just tells me to pray.

I'm not a religious man, but I certainly pray for the health of the poor woman whose son was murdered by four Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver International Airport last October.

After watching on the Internet four young Mounties taser and then stomp this unfortunate Polish man to death, I see this incident as a harbinger of more bad to come. Robert Dziekanski you are a martyr whether you know it or not. May your soul rest in peace.

So, while my cousin says we all need to pray, I say we need to educate.

When I say we need scientists, I mean earth scientists: doctors to heal the world, because she is gravely wounded and her lifeblood is running out, disappearing like the snows of Kilimanjaro.

The most important thing we can teach our kids is how to love our planet. But, this isn't being taught. Or, if it is, it is not being taught enough, because look around and what do you see?

I see waste, smog, pollution, dwindling resources and a loss of biodiversity, while human life, of which there is a glut, surges on like a great tsunami of greed, bankrolled by paper money, speculation, and cries of more, more.

What do you see? Or are you too busy making money to give a damn? That's okay, you can check out in another 20, 30 years, but what about your sons and daughters, and their children?

The one truth all the politicians dare not say is really quite simple: there are too many people. The best way to make space for new life is to let old life die. But we can't do that. We have to hook everyone up to machines and pump them full of drugs.

Global warming, pollution, environmental degradation, famine, dwindling resources and biodiversity are caused by too many people. It's as simple as that.

We can enact all the measures we can think of to combat global warming, but as long as the human population continues to increase, nothing that we do is going to help. Nothing that we do is going to make one damn bit of difference as long as numbers keep surging.

I'm not saying we have to set aside every bit of rainforest that exists. I'm just saying we can do better than this. We can do a lot better. Well, why aren't we?

Because everyone ― at least here in Korea ― is relying on technology to save the planet. Everyone is relying on scientists ― not the biologists, not the geologists, not the good guys but the masters of the world of genetic engineering, the manipulators of DNA, the designers of our future _ to save the day.

To hell with them, I say. Go out and embrace nature. What's left of it, anyway.

You gotta hand it to Bush, he's a fighter. He never gave up, and now he's won. The Iraqi people rolled over dead (one million of them). The American people rolled over dead (figuratively).

Congress rolled over dead, and the rest of the world rolled over dead, and now we are all waiting for Dick's pacemaker to stop ticking, or war to begin with Iran ― whichever comes first.

We have one more year of shrill hysteria and propaganda coming from Washington D.C. left: al-Qaida this and Taliban that. Terror here and terror there. Terror everywhere. Well, let me tell you, unless you live in Pakistan, al-Qaida and the Taliban are the least of your worries.

You're more likely to get tasered by a fat cop in some university library if you are American, or choke to death on pollution if you are Chinese.

Civil liberties are down, war is up, and the stock market is volatile and nobody has a clue what the hell is happening. And the Korean government is still looking to America for the answers.

I'll tell you what's happening. George Bush and Dick Cheney have made themselves and their crony's rich while virtually gutting the U.S. Constitution and choking the American middle class.

They have lined the pockets of the security and defense industry ― companies such as Blackwater, Halliburton, Raytheon, Northrop and more ― with rich contracts, signed in the blood of the Iraqi people.

Think things will change in another year? The only U.S. presidential hopefuls that are not part of the military-industrial complex are Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, and they stand no chance of getting elected.

Expect more war, well into the future. But hey, war keeps the human population down, although nearly not enough.

There were two good news stories in the last few weeks. Canada set aside a huge area of boreal forest for permanent preservation, and Australia elected Kevin Rudd, who signed the Kyoto Protocol, as their new leader. So much for the good news.

Merry Xmas.

The writer, a graduate of University of Texas, Austin, now writes from Gangneung, Gangwon Province. He can be reached at koreachronicles@yahoo.com.