A PAEAN TO OLD POMPEI

Something peculiar, even frightening, is happening to the Bristlecone Pines out West. These majestic trees tower hundreds of feet, and live more than 4000 years. They stood watch over the California forests before Jesus, or Aristotle, or even the pharaohs walked this same planet. A testament to tenacity in a world of the temporary.

But now, in fierce irony, the tiny bark beetle may slowly but irrevocably bring them down. Science is mounting a counter-attack, but their fate may defy technology's best efforts. And so it is with so many of the enduring parts of the hard-won civilization humanity has scratched from out of raw nature.

Consider the astonishing Persian capitols now only dust blowing in the Iranian sands. The admired Egyptian Sphinx being patched and propped every few decades. The architectural treasures of ancient Greece being desperately salvaged from the tentacles of time. Even the holy places in the Holy Land, continuing to withstand the assaults of archaeological skeptics, must now watch over the steady stream of Christians leaving that troubled place for safer homes in the West (a kind of Christian Diaspora).

With history's natural and man-made monuments trembling before the march of time, with the planet's rhythms and climates threatened in the hands of rapacious diggers and drillers, what do earth's populations do? Well, there is Friday-Saturday-Sunday football...there are new spectacles from Hollywood....re-churned reality shows from television... a psychotic diet of celebrity and political gossip...and of course the holiday malls.

The ancient Pompeians pretty much went about doing what they always did too. Despite the rumblings and warnings from a Vesuvius they could see every morning.Thinking big is hard. Thinking small is safe. The funny thing is that history has had its history of prophets and Cassandras warning us. But neither are very welcome.

Circa 2010, the world has no shortage of new prophets and Cassandras. Some wear religious symbols; others bear standards of scholarship; still others preach from the pulpits of newspapers, campuses, and the Internet. The result is a first in history -- the voices of fire are no longer that of the few, but now of the many. In fact, so many so often so everywhere that this cacophony becomes too loud to bear. Too confusing to decipher.

What else can a mere mortal do...? Mercifully tone it down. Maybe even turn it off. Perhaps another get-away-from-it-all weekend. Yes. Like they did in old Pompeii.