A Pair of 6's, or Three of a Kind?

Tomorrow is one of those days which is going to cause a lot of almost reasonable people to hold their collective breaths - and then some - for a while. Now I well understand a certain affinity people may have for 6 June. For more than three decades I have followed the reunions of the D-Day Normandy landings, visited there many times on that date, and become friends with a number of US and British D Day veterans. (Iris has told me more than once, " You're going to think you were actually THERE on June 6th!!") So, for me, June 6th has a certain ring to it; I can still get misty eyed just listening to Dwight Eisenhower's radio broadcast to the Europeans to announce the landings. Contrary to anything that would be done today, it was a study in pure minimalist broadcasting, representing the greatest movement of men and machinery ever done, with just a couple of paragraphs of understated instruction. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/schoolradio/history/worldwar2audioclipslibrary_clip33.shtml) Tomorrow, however, is a different kind of June 6th. Reminiscent of the <666> Cigarettes which used to be sold in Asia, the cult of 666 has raised it's head again: You remember 123456? (1:23 am April 5, 2006), well tomorrow is 666's all the way, and if the AntiChrist is lurking, and waiting around with his Subway ticket, ready to take the big ride, then we'll just have to see what happens. I don't really imagine that its such a big deal. I mean, in 1806 or 1906 were hundreds of people ready to leap off cliffs at the thought of the impending arrival of Satan? Well, I guess if they did jump, then it must have been more about them than it was Satan. And here is the point: Sometimes we have too much data. I can't really call it Information, that would be too flattering. Let's just call it data. Everywhere you look (in this Blob, too I might add) is a lot of data. We'd like to think it was information, but that would require actual INFORMING to be present. No, it's not really INFORMation, it's more like DataCOLLECTION. Information has an implication of imparting things of import (OK.. four "IM.." words in one sentence, I guess that retires the Cup, right?) The thing I don't really get in this self indulged world is how all the doom sayers think that the whole of the Human Endeavor -- you know, since we started walking on just TWO legs -- has come down to THEIR own personal apocalypse: yes, hundreds and hundreds of generations of Humanity, and THIS generation is the one worthy of being smote by the forces of Good and Evil? Give yourselves a break, people! Many more interesting and deserving martyrs have been living throughout history, and were much more meriting the chance to go up in a cataclysmic puff of smoke. Honest to God, (no pun intended), if the people awaiting their rhapsody - yeah, the ones in the Ford Van in front of you at the traffic light - think that the pinnacle of Human History rests upon their being ready to ascend, then, we really have deluded ourselves. I give satan credit: there is no question that a lot of the terrible things in this world, and now that they are so well reported, we know about many of them which probably remained unknown for centuries before, are the result of some kind of cloud of Evil which lurks in the human soul, and which needs very little prodding to emerge. But to assume that We are THE generation to which the final Wipe Out will be given as some kind of weird gift to show our piety, misses the point. Rather than spending all that time figuring out how we can be in the Front row at the end of humanity, lets spend another ten minutes trying to figure out just what we can do to make things better today. The odds are (talk to your Vegas bookie.. I'm sure they have the numbers) that on June 7th, we ll all be sitting around twiddling our thumbs, and thinking, as that second Raspberry Frappacino starts to melt crystal by crystal, well, THAT was an exciting June 6th. We're just sayin.

David