It seems like every few years there's another global event that threatens our very existence.  Somehow, through a common and unrelenting determination to prevail, we've been able to outwit, outplay, and outlast them all.

The first threat to human existence that I can remember learning about was the onslaught of Killer Bees.  It was the fifth grade and our class was talking about current events.  We each had a copy of a booklet that showed a map of how far north these hybrid bees (wasps and honey bees?) had already migrated.  They had already infested Texas and Florida and were moving up through Georgia.  In a just a few short years they would arrive in North Carolina, and that would be the end of life as we knew it.  That's scary stuff when you're ten years old!

It was a year or so later that we learned of the next impending disaster.  The Ozone Layer was being depleted because of cars, factories, and cans of hairspray.  Antarctica had already lost it's ozone layer, and -- I'm sensing a trend here -- the problem was moving northward.  At the estimated rate of depletion, temperatures would continue to rise, and we would all be baked to a crisp.

I remember our seventh grade science textbook notified us of the next threat that every middle-schooler needs to know.  The world would Run Out Of Oil by the year 2024.  No more gasoline, our transportation system would come to a halt, and the hinges on that squeaky door would never get fixed because you wouldn't have any 3-in-1 oil. 

Sometime in the 1990s, biological threats became all the rage.  Wasn't there talk about the Ebola Virus spreading out of control?  (I could have googled for hours on this essay, but I didn't.  This is just from memory.  Or, maybe I'm confusing reality with a season of 24.)  I don't know how it started or from where it came, but we were all at risk.

At the end of 1999, we were all treated to a new kind of threat.  The Y2K Threat would be responsible for shutting down all of the world's technology, and it might be days, weeks, or months before life returned to normal.  All of this was because a lowly programmer back in the 1970s tried to save a few bits and bytes by only allowing for two characters to represent the year.  Thank goodness we made it through that debacle!

In the early 2000s, we were back to the biological threats.  Was it in 2003, when the SARS threat made headline news every day?  Nightly newscasts opened with footage of workers and pedestrians in Asia wearing surgical face masks to ward off this contagious beast.  There were some people who died from it, but there are also people who die from a toothache and they're not on the evening news. 

Just as we were thanking our lucky stars to have survived the SARS outbreak, the news media introduced us to the H1N1 Swine Flu.  This was guaranteed to be much worse than SARS.  The Swine Flu had the potential to rival the 1918 flu pandemic that swept across the country a century earlier.  It had started in Mexico in the height of the tourist season, and it would surely begin spreading to the north into the US.  We all waited in frightened anticipation for it to mutate into a communicable behemoth, the likes of which we had never seen!  We never did see it.  But at least they got all those vaccines ready just as the threat tapered off.

Finally, there's Global Warming.  I'm not exactly sure when or how the ozone layer problem morphed into "Global Warming", but the basic screenplay is the same.  Society has recklessly industrialized itself to the point where we are destroying our planet.  It's just a matter of time before we reach the point of no return!

While I admit I put a sarcastic spin on these events, I also admit that some -- or maybe all -- of them were, or could have been legitimate issues to deal with.  Still yet, I wonder what happened to all those killer bees that were coming to get us.  Have they been hiding in the bushes, waiting to sting us until we least expect it?  If those bees have been waiting for 25 years, that's gonna be one nasty bee sting!  I think I'll stock up on ointment just in case.