Boy, we sure have been having a fun decade so far, haven’t we? Fires, pandemics (plural, oh boy!), war, inflation, Betty White dying, bizarre political upheaval and instability, environmental collapse, the erosion of human rights, drought, flooding, Jared Leto getting his own superhero movie—the list goes on. It’s been...a challenging time for all of us. However, something that can be incredibly cathartic during these times of travail and suffering is to reflect on how much worse it really could be—and believe it or not—it sure could be a lot worse. On that note, here is a wildly incomplete breakdown of some of the times and places on earth it would suck way, way worse to be than the here and now.
Known colloquially as "The Year Without a Summer," this period in history was as miserable as it was unpreventable. Likely caused by the eruption of Mt. Tambora in the Dutch East Indies in 1815, this super shitty year was marked by massive crop failure, extreme cold, and no hot summer fashions to speak of. Huge floods in China, famine across large swaths of the world, and accompanying pestilence all joined hands and set aside their differences to make this time on Planet Earth a bummer for everyone. This boiled down to what’s known as a "volcanic winter," when all the little ash particles and shit band together in harmony and blot out the sun. It kills plants, brings snowstorms in July, chokes waterways with sludge, and if you breathe it, makes you sound like Magda from the dive bar, who smokes two packs of non-filters a day, and calls you "honey" in a way that’s both endearing and somehow really unsettling. So, kind of like the PNW every summer now, only with more snow and less fire.
On what is now the northwestern coast of Italy used to be a small nation known as Genoa. Local Genoese Christians and Mongol traders had managed to establish a tense sort of peace, as the small nation had become an eclectic trading hub between the east and west—a wacky mix of folks from all over, coming from nowhere and going wherever. Think Casablanca meets Tatooine meets a Chinese takeout place in Mexico City. Whatever, it was bustling. Well, as you might expect them to do, tensions rose as word of the new plague started circulating, and as you might expect, people started pointing fingers. The first and easiest to blame have always been "those fucking foreigners!" (Not Foreigner, though, because we all want to know what love is, don’t we?) One thing led to another, and after a series of reciprocal murders, the Mongols were asked not so nicely to GTFO. In predictable fashion, hit fit the shan, and after an extended siege, the beleaguered Mongols started succumbing to this new plague (possibly, but not definitively proven to be "black plague," or yersinia pestis, if you’re a nerd like me). Because they were understandably pretty fuckin’ pissed at this point, the Mongols started catapulting the bodies of their dead into the walled city. This may be the oldest use of germ warfare ever recorded; though they may not have known they were introducing disease into the city, it may have just been more of a "Bless your heart, here are some rotting corpses to enjoy." We’ll never know, but it certainly did the trick because, after this point, the plague spread across the whole of Europe like, well...the plague. The rest is a flea-ridden history.
Another volcano one, I know, I know. Think of it, though, the well-respected author, naturalist, and philosopher, Pliny the Elder, pulls up in his boat to the fancy resort town of Herculaneum as pumice begins to rain from the sky. In what may be some ill-spoken last words after some level of hesitation was expressed from the crew, he says, "Fortune favors the bold; steer to where Pomponianus is." Yeah, he was kind of a fatty, with what we’d probably now call asthma, and died shortly thereafter from the toxic off-gasses of the first pyroclastic flow that enveloped them. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, managed to avoid the whole dying thing, and his words remain as the most verbose and florid descriptions of the havoc that Mt. Vesuvius wreaked: "Wow, that sucked," he is quoted as saying.
Others were less fortunate and died in the hellish bombardment of ash and liquid rock raining from the sky. Most famously, the Pompeii bodies bear silent testament to the sudden and catastrophic hellscape their world turned into in an instant. Most especially, this body transformed instantly into ash, then buried under detritus and soot—preserved for eternity, making the best of a bad time.
Yeah, okay, I get it; there weren’t any people 66 million years ago, sure. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have fucking suuuucked to look up in the sky, see a streak of fire, and then suddenly be consumed by a raging inferno from the vacuum of space. This was—if you remember anything at all from middle school science class—the bar-thirty for dinosaurs. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.
For many years, scientists assumed that dinosaurs were basically not fucking enough, which is why they died. Yeah, okay, guys, whatever. Anyhow, Luis and Walter Alvarez (nerd fact: a father and son duo—the elder of whom helped design the A-Bomb) realized that this was a load of horse hockey and proposed the idea of a huge fucking meteor. Scientists scoffed at them for years, but history has proven they were 100% correct, as evidenced by a ring of beautiful cenotes around where the meteor struck; subterranean caves, whose sandy guts were turned into liquid glass and propelled into the sky, only to come drizzling back down in a torrential downpour of absolute shittiness.
This asteroid absolutely obliterated life in the region, but if you weren’t killed by the firestorms, liquid glass rain, or shock wave, you’d have almost certainly perished in the environmental devastation that followed. Tight.
536+ AD — Named by medieval historian Michael McCormick as "the worst year to be alive," this time was a Venn diagram of horrible things: a volcanic winter that plunged most of Europe into the coldest decade in thousands of years, social and civil unrest, and the first outbreaks of the Plague of Justinian (bubonic plague) in Rome in 541, which would go on to devastate for hundreds of years to come.
2016 — David Bowie died. Fuck you, God.
1918 — During WWI, The Spanish Flu killed more people, all told, than the war itself, but we’ve kind of been through this shit by now, so suck it up, buttercups.
This is only a small glimpse of the awful times life has been through (and lived through!) on this planet. Somehow, life keeps chugging along and occasionally finding ways to make the best of things (cheese fries, naps, cuddly pets, a fat bowl, boobs—a few of my favorite things). Just because things might seem dark now doesn’t mean they can’t get better—or worse—depending on how you look at it.
Esmeralda Rupp--Spangle derives joy from nihilism, somehow. She can be found on Instagram as @EsmeraldaSilentCitadel if you feel like throwing rotten tomatoes or asteroids at her.
