The kind of stuff folks just don't want to know about...
Clue #2. There is an old episode of Star Trek (City on the Edge of Forever, 1967) where Dr. McCoy travels back into time to the Great Depression and saves Joan Collins from getting hit by a truck. Back in the future, the Starship Enterprise suddenly disappears. Because Joan lived, her political activities as a pacifist delayed America’s entry into the war just long enough for Hitler to develop the atomic bomb first. He thus won the war and history took an entirely different path – one in which the Enterprise was never built. Kirk and crew had the painful duty to go back to that time and stop Dr. McCoy from saving her life, so that history could be restored.
What struck me was the spooky feeling the crew must have had walking among people, long dead to them, who were going about their routine pre-war lives with no clue of the august events that were about to unfold. Kirk and crew had a certain detachment from what was going on around them, knowing what must soon happen and that it could not (and should not) be changed. They were truly “in that world, but not of it.”
I got that same feeling in Pompeii looking at plaster castings of the remains of those who perished in the eruption of Mt Vesuvius on 24 August 0079. If I could somehow walk among them that summer, not knowing the day or the hour of the eruption, but having the awful certainty I was in the right year, what would I do? Would I try to warn them? How would I get them to take me seriously? How long would I be willing to sit up with these "dead men walking", reasoning about what was coming, before reluctantly deciding to get out of there myself?
Now it's happening again as I read my favorite doomsday theories like The End of America , by John Price and similarly themed books that seem to be popping up everywhere these days. (Pick your man-made disaster scenario: currency collapse, electromagnetic pulse, pandemic, BitShares surpasses Bitcoin, terrorism, ...but I repeat myself.) Many make a pretty good case that it’s the new, “fundamentally changed” America and its bankster-controlled New World Order that the Bible is talking about in Revelation 18 where it reads “‘Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour your judgment has come.” Here's the whole description of that Biblically foreseen empire, if the shoe fits.
“The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore— cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and the souls of men.
Alas, this time McFly, history is not gonna change.
Nah.
No world empire has ever disappeared that fast.
Why, that would take an Act of God!
But if I were to take such books seriously, I'd wonder if I should continue to hang around Ground Zero trying to warn people who lack ears to hear. How much longer am I really obligated to continue “sittin’ up with the dead”?
“Well I ain’t sittin’ up with the dead no more,
I don’t know about you”
“No I ain’t sittin’ up with the dead no more,
No matter what you say or do!”
-- Ray Stevens, Sittin’ up with the Dead