In this last of meeting places/ We grope together And avoid speech/ Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Nevil Shute's On the Beach is a story worth remembering as we watch with anxious anticipation how the scenario will unfold in Ferguson, Missouri. 

In Shute's story a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR has completely destroyed the world, save for the residents of Australia (and New Zealand). The deadly radiation from this conflict, however, is traveling from the northern hemisphere to Australia, and the characters in his book spend their final moments on earth knowing they are doomed. 

No deus ex machina shows up to grant them an extension of life, only the aftermath of an atomic conflagration. 

Shute invites the reader to ponder the concept of being beyond salvation and knowing the date of their expiration.

For the civilization white people created in Ferguson (recall, the city was 99 percent white in 1970, just five years after the 630-foot Gateway Arch was completed), the On the Beach moment is close at hand in the 67 percent black city. 

The last white mayor of the city, James Knowles, has already told CNN to "prepare for the worst" once the grand jury decision on Officer Darren Wilson becomes public knowledge. 

Gun sales are spiking in the area, the group Mothers March for Justice has called for peace and invoked pray for divine intervention, while Trayvon Martin's father has called for calm in Ferguson and an end to the [black-in-origin] "culture of violence" in St. Louis. 

"War," is what one black person is preparing for in Ferguson. [Ferguson Resident: ‘We are Getting Prepared for War’, CBS St. Louis, 11-10-14]:

Ronardo Ward, 33, is one of those hoping to maintain peace in Ferguson if Wilson isn’t indicted. 

“We are getting prepared for war,” Ward told CBS News. “And that’s just crazy.” 

Michael Johnson, 42, believes many young people will rail against the “system.” 

“There’s gonna be a lot of angry young people that’s pretty much not gonna listen to the system anymore,” Michael Johnson said. “Why should they?” 

Protests have been going on for months following Brown’s death in August. 

“The destruction here symbolizes this community, and how fragile and crumbled things are here,” Johnson told CBS News. 

Despite the potential violence, Johnson doesn’t believe Ferguson is ready to explode if Wilson is not indicted. 

“I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as people want to make it out to be, but I think there’s some tough times ahead,” Johnson stated.

Doom.

No hope of salvation.

"Prepare for the worst."

 But the "worst" has always been with us, because we've refused to acknowledge the metaphorical atomic bombs from Shute's novel have already detonated in our world. The situation in Ferguson is a reminder the black undertow has no half-life, with the ability to be just as lethal in 2014 as it was two generations in North St. Louis in 1980.

The year St. Louis was crowned America's 'murder capital'. [St. Louis is U.S. 'murder capital', Associated Press, 4-5-1980]:

St. Louis - Street violence - most of it in the blighted black neighborhoods on the north side of St. Louis - has put this Midwestern river port on top the national heap in murder statistics.  

Police recorded 230 murders in St. Louis in 1978, 46 for every 100,000 residents - highest ration in the nation and more than double the rate in New York City.  

"A stickup in St. Louis used to be 'Your money or your life,'" said a cab driver. 

"Now it's 'Your money AND your life.'" 

St. Louis civil leaders say the predominantly black enclose on the north side, where murder is most frequent, have become virtual war zones.  

St. Louis' chief prosecutor issued a public plea for help in curbing the violence. In an open letter to black church leaders, Circuit Attorney George Peach said 84 percent of the 285 persons slain last year were black.  

In the cases that were solved, all the black victims were killed by other blacks, he added.  

"With these harsh figures before us, it is not difficult to say that blacks are killing each other an alarming rate," Peach, who is white, said in his letter. 

"The slightest arguments of result in bloodshed. We've got to stop the quick rush to the gun to settle disputes," Peach said.  

The typical murder victim in St. Louis is a black male in his 20s, gunned down by a neighbor in a street near his home. In 64 percent of the killings a handgun is used. 

The victim may have resisted a robbery, fought over money or been targeted by drug dealers.  

"The law enforcement agencies take the attitude that, 'Well, there's another black killed. That's one less black we have to deal with,'" said state Rep. Fred Williams of St. Louis, who is black.  

But Police Chief Eugene Camp commented, "You can't patrol against murder. if someone wants to kill somebody, how can we stop it?" 

Black leaders say the business community has virtually abandoned the crime-ridden north side. What's left, they say, is unemployment and poverty.  

St. Louis has lost 58,000 manufacturing jobs in the last 10 years. It stands to lose another 5,000 jobs over the next couple of years as General Motors abandons its north side assembly plant, the city's single largest source of tax revenue and one of its biggest employers. The operation will be relocated in rural Wentzville, 45 miles west of St. Louis.  

"When an industry thinks about where it wants to relocate, it doesn't want to have its employees subjected to the kind of crime problems St. Louis has," said Williams.  

Some police officers, unhappy with the department's failure to curb the murder rate, have organized the St. Louis Police Ethical Society. Its leader is Sgt. James Buchanan, a black who says the city should hire more black officers to try to deal more effectively with the crime in the black community.  

St. Louis' population of 500,000 is more than 50 percent black. The police force of about 2,000 officers is 18 percent black. City officials say the cannot find enough qualified black officers.  

Many murder investigations are hampered because witnesses decline to testy in court, and the reason, said Buchanan, is the unwillingness of some blacks to cooperate with white police officers. 

"We could solve part of that if we had more black officers doing homicide investigations," Buchanan said, noting that of 16 detectives on the homicide squad, only two are black.  

Peach said he didn't know what percentage of those arrested are never charged. But in "a pretty nice chunk" of cases where murder suspects are freed for lack of evidence, Peach said, the problem is a lack of willing or credible witnesses.  

Peach said in many cases unwilling witnesses have an attitude of "to hell with the police, to hell with the courts."

When this article was published in newspapers around the country back in 1980, the city of Ferguson was 85 percent white and 14 percent black.

Many of those white people in Ferguson reading this story in 1980 probably smiled, noting exactly why they had been part of the white flight from St. Louis and how they now slept comfortably at night far from the sound of police sirens.

But the problems of St. Louis - detailed in this hilariously prophetic article for Ferguson's problems in 2014 - have migrated to Ferguson, precisely because the population responsible for creating the "virtual war zones" of 1980 have migrated to the suburb.

Just as the population responsible for creating a peaceful community (where nice, respectable affirmative action-enhanced or public sector employed blacks can raise their families away from the violence of blacks) migrated from Ferguson once it became impossible to maintain standards of civility.

Perhaps, like those characters in Shute's novel, the white people (and the civilization they birthed) of not just Ferguson, but all of America are doomed.

Or perhaps it's this civilizational iteration that is doomed, with just this nation ultimately doomed?

All in all, perhaps it's just a coincidence tomorrow is Veterans Day and the fear of roving bands of black insurgents/insurrectionists in Ferguson and metropolitan St. Louis (unleashed by the news Officer Darren Wilson faces no charges for his justified actions in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown) represent a power image for what exactly those brave - almost overwhelmingly white - men gave their lives for: the right for black people to protest, whine, and even threaten mass violence until they get their way.

And forcing white people to continually pay for this unalienable right of eternal black grievance to perpetuate.

The dysfunction of the black community has its origin not in a political ideology, a lack of an embracement of free market principles, moral collapse, high rates of abortion, or the erosion of the nuclear family: the dysfunctions source is merely the individual black people who collectively are responsible for creating the conditions of the community.

It's not white people's fault that 67 percent black Ferguson is collapsing, just as it was not white people's fault that in 1980 predominantly black north St. Louis was - and still is - a "virtual war zone."

This civilization is doomed, but by no means does this fact doom the people whose collective will to power birthed it; there stands a monument to the vision of the white people who founded, explored, settled, and built this nation in St. Louis, and from the top of it one might be afforded a view of the suburb where it proves T. S. Eliot correct (cue up The Hollow Men):

This is the way the world ends 

This is the way the world ends 

This is the way the world ends 

Not with a bang but a whimper.