Kirby: Fearfully watching for signs
by Robert Kirby
Salt Lake Tribune columnist

The tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean last week killing an estimated 150,000 people is easily the greatest natural disaster to occur in our lifetimes.
   The event shocked even people who have seen a lot. Surveying the destruction, Secretary of State Colin Powell broke down and wept, saying, ''I've never seen anything like this.''
   Seeing something they've never seen before is giving some people the idea that it's a sign. For them, it can only mean that the Lord has his foot in the door of the long-awaited Second Coming.
   Without discounting the obvious anguish associated with the recent tsunami, let me be analytical enough to point out that this isn't the worst thing that has ever happened to the human race. It's only the worst thing in recent memory.
   Things like this are not necessarily signs that the Lord is coming to get us, but rather proof that life on this planet is a precarious existence.
   If this is a sign of the Second Coming, then it's been flashing for at least 2,000 years. An earlier ''sign'' was the A.D. 542 plague of Constantinople that killed 300,000 people in four months.
   Worse, there was the great earthquake that hit China on Jan. 23, 1556, killing 830,000 people outright and who knows   how many collaterally from disease, injury and starvation.
   That was an accident. In 1642, river dikes were deliberately broken by Chinese rebel forces battling the Ming Dynasty. The subsequent flood drowned 300,000 people in and around the city of Kaifeng.
   The Lord still hadn't shown up by 1727 when an earthquake flattened much of Tabriz, Iran, killing 75,000 people almost overnight. And since counting corpses was even less of an exact science back then than it is now, no one knows how many died in the outlying areas.
   Eight years later, a diphtheria epidemic swept through New England, killing an estimated 80 percent of all children under the age of 10.
   Closer to our time is the 1931 Yangtze River Flood that drowned immediately and starved or sickened to death soon thereafter approximately 3.7 million folks.
   War, particularly in the Middle East, is mentioned as a sign of the times. A bad one is going on right now, though I doubt it's a sign. You have to go further back in time to see that this area has always been a mess.
   Shortly before A.D. 1218, Genghis Khan solved his own Afghanistan problem by killing 1.6 million people in just six months. And he did it without smart bombs.
   I'm not saying that the Second Coming isn't coming - only that watching for it   doesn't make a lot of sense. Everyone on this planet is in the process of dying in some way.
   Second-hand smoke killed 50,000 Americans last year. But because it was stretched over a year, nobody is calling it a sign of the times.
   Instead of fearfully watching for signs that happen to other people, start paying attention to your own situation and take heart in the fact that you can do something about it. How we live is more important than how we die.
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   Salt Lake Tribune columnist Robert Kirby welcomes mail at 143 S. Main St., Salt Lake City, UT 84111, or e-mail at rkirby@sltrib.com.