The citizens of Rome, at the height of its power, must have thought it could never possibly fall. But that world of Roman domination did eventually come to an end.

In America, there have already been mini-apocolypses all over the country. Great cities like Detroit rose and fell. Where there was once prosperity, there is now poverty, misery, and crime.

The world, as people knew it, has already ended many times before. Empires rise and fall. Peoples conquer and perish. All things in this world are transitory.

I'm not prophesying that it will be the end of time for everyone, but for many people it will be. And this complacent attitude, which lulls us to sleep with happy thoughts and a magical reading of history that seems to predict a bright future, can surely be counted as one of the contributing factors to the immanent end of the world as we know it.