Technically and typically a catastrophist is someone who thinks that rather than a gentle evolutionary slope of slow change over time, the world has been ripped and torn and shoved ahead by massive catastrophic events. The dinosaurs were killed by a meteor. Bam. Catastrophe. Bam. T-Rex buys it. Bam. Lemurs rule the world.
On a more personal level, a catastrophist is someone who envisions all nightmare scenarios possible for any given equation. Teenager + new license + family car = kidnapped by Bermudian bandits. I know. I know. There’s a lot of missing steps in that formula, but believe it when I say, I can get there in my own head.
I am a catastrophist.
You can’t tell me that bad things aren’t going to happen. I’ve been alive too long for that nonsense. And yes, I know that is a double negative, making the bad things an absolute certainty.
Nixon did lie.
Kennedy was a dog.
Pandemics do happen every 100 years.
Hitler did manage to turn a nation of God-fearing Christians into homicidal accomplices.
And if you put a toddler next to the dog’s food bowl, that kid is going to eat that dog food. And if the dog food is next to the dog’s water, that kid is going to dunk the dog food in the dog’s water first and then eat the dog food. Guaranteed.
It’s like being a prophet with no followers or a general with no army. Sigh.
Being a catastrophist isn’t pessimistic; it isn’t even negative. It’ just thinking ahead.
Okay, I will concede that not everything goes into the toilet. Sometimes people who are late for curfew have not been kidnapped and trafficked for sex work. Sometimes it’s just a flat tire . . . slashed by a serial killer, waiting in a thicket . . . I mean . . . sometimes . . . it’s just a couple of kids groping each other under the light of a full moon . . . and werewolves.
See?
My combat soldier son, who knows a thing or two about real evil and true catastrophe, says there is medication that can help. Of course, the side effects run for a page and half and include things like blindness, scaly skin, and vampirism.
And yes, Vlad the Impaler, a great catastrophist, did Shish Kabob a bunch of invaders looking to set up shop in the shadow of his creepy castle. In his country, they have statues of him and call him a national folk hero. In this country they turn him into a vampire and make him sparkle in the sunlight.
Catastrophe.
And yes, I am a writer. Amazon.com/author/lindazern
Linda (The Sky IS Falling) Zern
