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The date of reckoning

DO you realise that in three days time the date is going to be 05/06/07?

I probably shouldn’t be reminding anyone. There’s still time for every crackpot from Cairns to Caloundra to come up with a portent for this auspicious date.

And none of them will be good.

The sooth-sayers who gather round dates like this never have good things to say. No one ever predicted the birth of a new world; or everyone winning the lotto. It’s always: The End of the World Is Nigh.

They’ll be up Castle Hill in their thousands waiting for the tidal wave that’s supposed to swallow the fleshpots of Townsville and Thuringowa.

Somehow it doesn’t have the same ring about it that Sodom and Gomorrah had.

They, too, were destroyed. By God, using brimstone and fire, because the residents were depraved.

Well yes, I know a bloke in North Ward who follows AFL and drinks wine, but surely that doesn’t count as depraved!

Anyway, as they say, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

Wait another month and we’ll be up to 07/07/07.

Now there’s a date for Armageddon. If you want the end of the world to happen in style, you’d have to choose a date like 07/07/07.

Of course, 01/01/01 had lots of promise, but it came and went and it didn’t take us all with it. In fact the only noteworthy thing that seems to have happened on the first of January recently was that the Euro became legal currency in 12 countries – but that was in 2002!

And I’m sure that the richest possible source of doom and disaster must have surrounded June 6 last year, which was 6/6/6, if you ignore the zeros.

The devil’s number!

You’d expect the smell of sulphur and burning flesh on a date like that, wouldn’t you?

But all we got on page 1 of The Australian was “State governments will have to borrow more than $10billion every year for the next five years to balance their books.”

Oh gosh.

Indeed, the very fact that The Australian was on the news stands – or that there were any news stands, suggests that, as the end of the world, 06/06/06 was a crock.

So now we’re falling back on July 7. They’ll be out there with their banners and placards and their mealy-mouthed predictions faster than you can say sin.

And it’s going to get worse! This must happen every time we enter a new millennium! Or for the first 12 years, anyway.

I betcha it’ll happen on 08/08/08 and so on right through to December 12, 2012. And the really frightening part is that on one of those days it’s entirely possible something awful will happen. And the small-brained breast beaters with the placards will say: “There! Told you so!” and go mincing off with a smirk on their faces because several thousand people have been incinerated in a volcanic eruption, or somesuch.

They’ll ignore the fact that in any bunch of random numbers even 07/07/07 is likely to come up sooner or later.

Look at the twin towers attack — 09/11/01 — what could be more innocuous than that!

And yet within days there were reports that “The number 11 has been linked to mystery and power since ancient times.”

Oh tosh!

Me? I’m more interested in the date 03/01/08.

Not only does it add up to 12 which, as we know, is the number of months in a year, the month Christmas falls in, and the number of apostles, which clearly indicates that something momentous will happen…

…but it’s also my birthday – so it must be true!