He had actually compared the star or comet or whatever the heck it was to the Star of Bethlehem at the time of the birth of Jesus.
Why? And why would they embarrass themselves by admitting that they’d been so stupid as to not know the difference between a star and a comet?
Fear? Intimidation? All of the above?
I hoped to God (or whomever) that those astrophysicists were still alive and that I could find them. The story didn’t give their ages, so they could be sixty, ninety, or dead and buried.
A sidebar to the piece, which I almost didn’t read because I thought it was unrelated, actually detailed some of the reactions—and predictions—to the comet’s appearance. In addition to all the Regular Joe “loonies” who predicted it presaged the Second Coming were these bulleted items:
• Canadian prophet Doug Clark called the comet a “star” and said that it signaled that Jesus was to return and lure Christians away from the Tribulation by April 1982. His basis was something called “The Jupiter Effect,” a theory put forth in a best-selling book by John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann. The book claimed that on March 10, 1982, an alignment of the planets was supposed to trigger earthquakes and fires that would kill millions.
• On March 22, psychic Benjamin Torre took an ad in the Los Angeles Times proclaiming, “The Christ is now here.”
• Rev. Pat Robertson took to the airways to declare on his 700 Club TV show, “I guarantee you by the end of 1982 there is going to be a judgment on the world.”
My first thought was: freaky, rapture-obsessed loonies. My second thought was even crazier: These freaky, rapture-obsessed loonies were all only off by a few decades!
I started thinking, and couldn’t stop, and turned on the screen on the pop-out computer terminal attached to the seat. No log-in was required for searching, and I keyed in “disasters of the new millennium.”
Christ!—no pun intended. It reads like the end of the world, for real!
There are too many to cite here, but it was the new millennium that had kick-started the chain of natural and unnatural disasters, right off the bat with devastating floods in 2000 in Southeastern Africa, which killed nearly 1,000 people. This was followed in 2001 by the World Trade Center attack, which in turn triggered the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, followed by constant war and unrest around the world—particularly in the Mideast—which have killed millions.
On Boxing Day 2004, there was the giant tsunami along the coasts of landmasses bordering the Indian Ocean, killing something like 230,000 people in I-don’t-know-how-many countries and destroying thousands of acres of land.
In 2005 there was Hurricane Katrina, which killed nearly 2,000, displaced millions, and ruined forever thousands of acres of land in the South.
In 2010–2011, the devastating floods in Australia, the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear plant disaster in Japan …
As the info was flowing, it all started blurring together in my tired brain: earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, plagues, pestilence, floods, forest and city fires, which had killed millions. No country was immune.
In fact, world-changing disasters had become so common that we had begun, I realized, to lose our collective memory about what “normal” was supposed to be.
Tabloids hardly even put giant disasters on the front pages anymore, unless they killed at least 500.
Maybe we do need a Second Coming. Shut up; you sound like a moron!
That was the last thought I had before I nearly jumped out of my seat when the cabin lights came on and the flight attendants started passing out hot towels, as dawn was beginning to break.
18
Yes, for the first time in recent memory I had actually fallen dead asleep on an overseas flight. My mouth was hanging open, and I could feel drool down the side of my chin. The Best Rate Motel folder was on the seat next to me, but all the news clippings were scattered under the footrest on the floor.
I felt like those people that you pray are never seated next to you on a flight, let alone an overnighter. I opened the shade and could see that the sun was starting to rise and the sky was turning orange.
The captain informed us that it was currently 6:00 A.M. local time and that it was a glorious day in Paris. That announcement would have gladdened my heart and excited my senses at any other time in my life. Now, it just gave me anxiety.
I made my way to the lavatory and used everything in the bag of goodies they still offered in the expensive seats: mini sizes of toothpaste, hand sanitizer, a tiny oxygen spray, and a comb that no one who wasn’t sporting a St. Anthony haircut could possibly get through their hair.
We landed on time, and as I figured, I had to shuttle it to another terminal, but thank God Turkey had just entered the EU finally, and I didn’t have to go through French customs, just passport control, which was a breeze.