All this talk about the Rapture and Judgment Day has led me down the path of wondering what the “end of days” will really look like when it does finally come.
My feeling is that we’re far more likely to go out with a whimper than a bang, and that we will continue to slowly bring about a man-made cause of our own extinction.
I don’t see widespread looting – the running joke on Facebook and elsewhere during this latest hoax – or a heartfelt announcement from Anderson Cooper confirming the veracity of the latest forecast of Armageddon.
Instead, I’m imagining populations of people being allowed, by the rest of us, to die off due to malnutrition and starvation. The so-called “fittest” will continue to survive, thanks to how superior we are to everyone else, all the while using our superiority to continue our contamination of the planet. Eventually our abuse of science will decimate a significant portion of the “haves,” either through some military mishap that involves weapons gone wrong, or by way of the toxification of our ecosystem to the point where it can no longer sustain us.
I could see this process taking hundreds of excrutiating years to play itself out. Life for the poorest among us will get more and more difficult, and those of us with resources will dig in our heels, fortify the ramparts and build our luxury bunkers (as featured on ABC'S Good Morning America).
I’m not all that familiar with the Bible. Or the Koran. I’m not sure whether or not either of them contain any verses that could be interpreted as the scenario I’ve just described. My point is that using scripture to envision a “televised” Rapture underscores our unique chauvinism as a species. The End of Days won’t be a dramatic TV event.
It will be the snuffing out of a candle that has been burning, less and less brilliantly, for centuries.
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