The Apocalypse Is Coming!

...Soon... I'm sure...well, fairly certain anyway... maybe... I dunno... could be. To watch the news, you'd think it's very soon. Especially since it is a presidential election year. Doom and gloom is the message everywhere, it seems. Global climate change, giant meteors maybe hitting the planet and triggering a mass extinction event (these have allegedly happened in the past); this time wiping all life from the planet. Not just humans but all life.
Think about it: the final retribution, not just paving the way for far in the distant future fuel sources being set up but total and complete annihilation. And, of course, the entertainment industry is taking advantage of the possibility (as they always have). I am talking about "You, Me, and the Apocalypse", of course. Sorta...

As a child, I fantasized about such an event. As I reached my teens, the fantasy grew larger but, somehow, I would survive it. In my daydreams, I would roam the country looking for clusters of survivors and living on my wits (and canned food from supermarkets), somehow I would not contract some disease from the multitude of corpses that would surely be scattered throughout the land. I didn't think about the horrible stench that would fall over the land. But I would contemplate how to get gasoline from pumps that had no electricity (all that stored energy pretty much unusable without energy to deliver it). I would have little competition from other humans, of course, but there would be dangers galore that I would have to avoid or overcome. In my fantasies, I would always (especially once I reached puberty) find a girl (or several) around my age that had, like me, somehow survived.

But the TV show is more about the events leading up to the mass extinction than the aftermath.

We humans are both fragile and resilient, some of us will survive the event... possibly only to die in the coming years of starvation or whatever. Think about it, something as minor as as a disease could become as deadly as the plagues of olden times. A broken bone might easily lead to your death, as it likely did for many who ventured out into the wilderness just a few hundred years ago.

I once wrote about surviving in the not so distant past when there was no indoor plumbing, no anesthesia... little of the modern amenities we depend on today. But we are a tenacious species and some would survive and learn to cope with what is left. Maybe that is why we love the Mad Max movies.