Doomsday can wait

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When Harry smiled you saw his rotten teeth. They were mostly black. Did they hurt? Didn't matter, because he had no plans for dental work.

Harry acknowledged your inevitable staring at his mouth by explaining that given the imminence of the second coming of Christ, it was pointless to waste time and money on something so trivial as dentistry. After all, we chosen believers would soon be graced with incorruptible spiritual bodies.

I accepted this rationale. It was 1970 and our sect's interpretation of the books of Revelation and Daniel indicated that Armageddon would arrive in 1972. Rather than paying a dentist, Harry would donate more to the church.

Christ did not return in '72, and many of us wearied of the sect's total control over our lives. I exited, and was "disfellowshipped" in 1974.

Twenty years later I steered a shopping cart into an aisle at a local supermarket and for the first time in over two decades came face-to-face with Harry. We stared for a moment, then he grinned in recognition. His teeth were perfect. He noted my glance at his mouth and laughed. He knew that I knew what those new teeth signified.

But what had compelled Harry to neglect his health in the first place? And me to admire his logic? Apocalyptic expectation, religious or otherwise, stems from fear and fatalism. In that context whatever scares us seems intractable, even foreordained. Even if our expectation is fearsome, fatalism can be comforting. If the future is inevitable (or "rigged," as in conspiracy theories), if powerful forces are in control and we are helpless pawns, then we really don't have to do anything. Our action or inaction won't matter, and if there's nothing to do, to think about, we avoid pain and toil. Harry avoided multiple trips to a dentist.

In 1970, my fear centered on the apparent inevitability of nuclear war and the first dire foreshadowing of environmental crisis. Ironically, the "solution" offered by our sect's interpretation of Biblical prophecies made atomic war and pollution look tame, as if more trauma could serve as antidote so long as its source was perceived as divine. My fears weren't baseless, but assuaging them by a total life immersion in those particular sectarian fantasies was not helpful — for me, for family and friends, for society.

I always thought the apocalyptic mind-set was a minority outlook, on the fringe of human sensibility, and perhaps 50 years ago that was true. Today, however, anticipation or dread of the "end" seems widespread. It could be the influence of perniciously negative social media algorithms — or maybe people have checked the time on the Doomsday Clock.

In 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists established the clock as a graphic expression of the threat humanity poses to its own existence. At that time the peril was nuclear war, and the hands were set at seven minutes to midnight — the symbolic end. It was meant to be sobering, and today the clock also represents the menace of climate change and "disruptive technologies" like bioweapons, AI surveillance, internet lies and hoaxes.

Over the past 75 years the indicated time has swung further from and closer to midnight. The least ominous setting — 17 minutes before midnight — was in 1991, due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and a perceived thaw in cold war tensions. A newly independent Ukraine even relinquished the nuclear arsenal within its borders — a justly celebrated act they possibly now regret.

In 2018, the indicated time was reset to two minutes before midnight, and in 2020 the clock reached its nadir so far: 100 seconds. That's where it remains today, influenced by war and nuclear saber-rattling in Europe, by what the Bulletin considers more talk than action on climate disruption, and by the COVID pandemic and its associated troubles.

The Burmese diplomat U Thant was secretary-general of the United Nations in the tumultuous era from 1961 to 1971, and toward the end of his term he wrote: "As we watch the sun go down … through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth … [will] some future universal historian on another planet say about us: 'With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight, and air, and food, and water, and ideas …'?"

An article in the Dec. 29, 1971, New York Times lauded the departing U Thant while lamenting the state of the U.N. itself: "In the poisoned international atmosphere of the sixties it is remarkable that the world organization — indeed, the world — has survived at all."

Both are still here.

The fundamentalist preachers I listened to in those fraught days were almost gleeful at the tribulations of the 1960s, seeing ample grist for their apocalyptic mill, and the even darker days ahead before the celestial cavalry arrived. These days I find the atomic scientists more credible, but doomsday is doomsday regardless of the messenger.

Any legitimate warning repays attention. But we need go no further than the fables of Chicken Little or the-boy-who-cried-wolf to understand there is a point of diminishing returns. We all grow weary of a drumbeat of catastrophe. I've been aware of the Doomsday Clock for a half-century, but I don't make a point of checking it. As a reasonably informed person I know what the issues are, and it's a personal obligation for everyone to edit the information glut.

I spent many years working as a wildland firefighter, and we routinely made use of lookouts, scouts and aerial observers to issue warnings. If you received such a message you simply took action to avoid the hazards, some of which indeed had catastrophic potential. To me that seems a worthy template for all alarms: listen, take action, move on with life.

Because no matter what happens (or doesn't happen) to the nation or the planet, your days as a sentient being here and now are numbered, so treasure them. You're going to die in any case; isn't that doom enough?

Once I acknowledge a warning and determine its trustworthiness and what I can do about it, I try to ignore further iterations of that same message. Fixating on "the end" is not helpful.

Obviously, we need to stay engaged. What we don't need to do is keep worrying. By all means lend the doomsayers an ear; if their concern is legit, do all you can to mitigate the danger, even if it hurts.

But keep your dental appointments.

Peter M. Leschak, of Side Lake, Minn., is the author of "Ghosts of the Fireground" and other books.