2012, Death, and Supposed Punishment

The world did not end on 12/21/12, but the number of celebrities who did not make it to year’s end is nevertheless so great it’s almost staggering.  Sadly, it’s a repeat of 2009 (which even then was called “the year when celebrities died”); when I first visited this page this week Jack Klugman’s picture was not posted yet and H. Norman Schwarzkopf was still alive: Notable Deaths of 2012 - NYTimes.com

The number of mass killings in the U.S. was also unusually high this year.  Add it all up and it does not mean that “someone is trying to tell us something,” and it likewise does not necessarily mean that the land or its people are now under some form of divine chastisement.  Many celebrities nowadays are simply getting older, and other celebrities are statistically running out of luck in terms of bad habits of theirs; furthermore, some people in this world are copycats, and copycatting itself may not be as common as it once was in contrasting the number of (for example) mass killings at schools for the five-year periods before and after Columbine.

So what lies behind the semblance of strange coincidences is sometimes other than what we initially think.  The Northridge quake of 1994 struck a part of a city no more evil than other parts of Los Angeles.  Hurricane Katrina wrecked parts of New Orleans that were no more evil than parts of many other American cities.  In other words, the inclination among religious or Christian people to see a run of bad events as being forms of chastisement is sometimes incorrect.  Considering the phrase “salt and light” and its origins in the Synoptic Gospels, the real punishment of wrongdoers in today’s messed-up society may actually end up being deferred until nothing short of Doomsday itself.  Wishful thinking will not change this, nor will constant picket signs from the people of Westboro Baptist Church.