Article: The Anti-Apocalypse Movement Wants to Break the Wheel of Destruction by Tony Sokol

The Anti-Apocalypse Movement Wants to Break the Wheel of Destruction

Article by Tony Sokol

 

I want to stop the end of the world and it’s all because of my daughter, and it’s got nothing to do with particular parental concern or altruistic intention for future generations. It’s because she told me the first time someone handed her a Bible, she immediately flipped to the end of the book to see how we all die. What kinds of books are these we’ve been foisting on kids since figuring out we’re all scared to die? They all have unhappy endings which lead to self-fulfilling prophecies because they’re touted as user’s manuals for life. They’re not. They’re books. They have characters, some of them wonderfully drawn, and these characters die. Some within pages of their own introduction, some in the same paragraph. That doesn’t mean we have to.

It doesn’t take a nihilist to understand the inherent dangers of worshiping religious tracts, some of which were written only as social commentary on oppressive governments, that have apocalyptic endings. Just because we all loved The Hunger Games doesn’t mean we’re looking forward to a dystopian future. From the most ancient of written and oral traditions, Eastern, Western, aboriginal or abbreviated, it appears no one can envision people without seeing extinction. We’re hardwired that way. We learned it in a book.

We don’t know when we’re all going to die, but die we must. We do already. Every one of us will encounter our own personal apocalypse, but unless we’re on some kind of suicide mission we won’t take anyone with us. We don’t know how we’re going to die, except that it will be on a spectacularly grand scale. It might be a comet, a cupid, or a Jeff Dahmer blitzkrieg. Some think it’s going to happen when Jesus gets back, as if he’s coming back armed. Let me tell you, Jesus really doesn’t want to come back, and if he does with that attitude, who needs him?

But time and time again we read that we have to go through this destruction cycle time and time again and some apocalyptic-enthusiasts are getting impatient. Their families have waited generations to see the end of all things and they’ve already set their DVRs. Others were taught it’s their duty to bring it about, in small increments if need be, aiming planes at towers, bombs over river banks or guns at worshipers already wishing they’d slept in once in a while on the Sabbath.

So many people believe that we’re in the time of the end of time we could stop a clock. Or we could rip out the last chapters of a couple books. Be careful though, sometimes these institutions of higher delusions hide their most malevolent tracts in the middle and stick poems and songs after it. You don’t want to rip those out. You wouldn’t have to rip out anything at all if you took the enforced inevitable as the science fiction it’s intended.