Tonight is the full moon. It is Friday the 13th. These two events do not occur very often.
For some people, this is pretty creepy. “Despite many myths, the full moon does not actually embolden criminals, bring about births or make people mad, studies show. And while Friday the 13th superstitions may be well entrenched, there’s nothing particularly special about a full moon falling on this date,” so says Yahoo’s Life Science Contributor Stephanie Pappas.
Officially, this phenomenon occurs at 12:11 AM Eastern Time. So for residents in the Central, Mountain and Pacific Time Zones, the moonrise actually happened on Thursday night. I guess the myths and associated creepiness applies to those who live in the Eastern Time Zone.
This celestial alignment will not occur again until 2049, according to several reports. By that time some of us will have passed on to our great reward, or not, and the modern day predictions of the futurists will have either proven spot on or just so much filler for yet another book that not many people read.
By then we will know if healthcare has been transformed – whether it costs less and is safer for the patients. We will know who was right about the Affordable Care Act, or whether it is even relevant. We will know whether lower Manhattan and other coastal communities are seeing the effects of global warming as well as if Jeff Bezos, the little man of Amazon who tried to form a monopolistic cartel to dominate online retail, succeeded, or was assassinated by a drone owned by a disgruntled author. To be honest, what Amazon is doing today is creepy enough. I do not need to conjure up his future.
Surely in 2049 we will know if the impact of sweeping changes in our societal norms — like same sex marriage and how parenting is defined — ruined life in the U.S. as we know it today or whether something else happened — like the divorce rate going down.
We will know whether the current Texas GOP platform contributed to the Texas moving from reliably “red” to permanently “purple” or “blue.”
We will also know whether the Republican candidate for the Oklahoma state legislature, who condoned stoning gays to death, enjoyed a brief or a storied political career. Personally, I hope he has no political career. The last thing we need in this country is an elected official condoning more violence, whether AK-47s are involved or not.
The only creepy thing for me this Friday the 13th is the realization that there are events in the future that I will not live to see. For the first two-thirds of my life, that thought rarely, if ever, crossed my mind. Today, from time-to-time, it does. Like if the Cowboys ever won another Super Bowl.