What Shall We Become

The train rolled through my small city. I heard the whistle and the steel wheels. I turned in bed and looked at the bedside clock. It displayed 3:00 AM. I watched until it changed to 3:01. I wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight.

For some reason, J Robert Oppenheimer was on my mind this past evening. Specifically, I reflected upon his thoughts upon witnessing the death of his creation (and the birth of a new terror) in the New Mexico desert. (I credit Oppenheimer, although he led a team of physicists.) His creation’s code name was Trinity; Oppenheimer gave it that name. Oppenheimer later recalled his thoughts: 

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

But as for that, the end has not arrived. The world may yet end; we have the tools to make it happen. Those tools await the touch of foolish humans. Vishnu, in the form of almost 8 billion of us, may still become the destroyer of our world.