Armageddon Does Not Need To Happen
By Chris Meyer
Opinions Editor

The So-Cal fires have come and gone, the ash swept away into gutters and landfills. But the cause of the fires still remains a mystery. Some blame out-of-work firefighters; others blame bark beetles or avant-garde film directors. But the smart money might lie on solar flares, already trumped up in the media to be the next “big scare” in the media today, following the long and proud tradition upheld by such ubiquitous non-disasters as Killer Bees, El Nino (Spanish for “The Nino”), West Nile Virus, and Joe Millionaire. The problem, though, is that this time there might actually be cause for serious concern, if late October’s inferno was any indication. According to cnn.com, the tripolar group of sunspots on the sun’s surface which caused these solar flares might be aimed right back at us within a few weeks.

Though unlikely, the thought of another blaze, especially so soon after the last one, creeps me out more than anything. What does it mean when the “new threat” to human existence is coming from the sun itself, the very thing that gives us life and energy? I fear for all mankind. It is hard to deny that on that Saturday afternoon, when the sky was at its darkest and a German polka band played in the Clark I courtyard, we seemed closer to the end of the world than ever before (Thank God the Cubs and the Red Sox didn’t make it to the World Series—that would have cinched it). Are these sunspots simply the first wave of disasters that will eventually lead us to the end of the world? Is our time really almost up? In the face of possibly impending Armageddon, all I can do is echo those prophetic words said years ago by Micah Pueschel ’04: “That’s weak, nature.”

Armageddon would suck for several reasons. I would never get to write the Great American Novel, nor would I get the chance to develop the best Mega Man video game of all time. America would never receive the visceral joy of kicking Bush out of the White House in 2004, nor would we gain states 51 through 67 by 2011. Burger King would never release the Homestyle Quintuple Chicken-Cheeseburger; we would never find out if alleged “Time Traveler” John Titor’s future predictions of civil war and tree houses (as seen on www.johntitor.com) come to pass. Pomona College would not set up a sister university on Mars, and nobody would invent a cure for tofu. Perhaps most importantly of all, of course: that bowling alley would never be installed in Smith Campus Center basement.

So really, with the impeding awesomeness that the future holds, the end of the world is not what we need right now. Stay the hell away from us, solar flares, so we can continue to frolic in the sun as mankind was meant to.