Apocalyptic Musings

May 21 has come and gone. There was no worldwide earthquake. The planet remains intact, with no amount of its billions of faithful having been called from its surface to receive the beauty immortal. What must one find, looking now upon a spring morning, if one was expecting the Rapture to have occurred two days ago? The sun shining horribly. The trees swaying in mute oblivion of the tumult that did not come, murmuring in a breeze that is oppressively free of ash and fire. The birds' songs offensive, mocking, laughing that nothing has been destroyed. They continue to live and breed and flit about in hateful glee that no sinners' tombs have opened and that no godless dead are to be seen lying upon the earth. How awful that we must persist to walk on this vulgar soil, under skies unmarred by pillars of smoke, in the ugly prison of the flesh. We have been denied the bliss of utter ruin, and we are left here in the tyranny of life's continuity.

Self-made prophet Harold Camping said of the apocalypse, "I am utterly absolutely, absolutely convinced it's going to happen." His certainty proved infectious; some believers left their homes and families and burned away their savings to spread Camping's message. It didn't matter if they had nothing, they might have reasoned, because they were soon going to a place where they would have everything. In an attempt to display their disdain for the physical realm, to show that they had no need of worldly things, they liquidated every asset. They cast their every possession away as utterly without purpose any longer, but I wonder, now, how their views may have changed. Now that they have no money, I wonder how unnecessary their worldly possessions seem. I wonder how negligible their family bonds appear now that they have cut them all in anticipation of joining a better family in a better place.
I wonder if they can see how selfish they have been.

No, the world did not end. It will not end in October, and it will not end in 2012, nor should we be so cavalier as to rejoice that it might. Should we be swayed by the fervor of those who hope for calamity? Surely, the masses who pray even now for the universe to meet its end in a holy inferno must remain far from the rational centers of our societies - if such things can be said to exist. Surely we must not heed them even to mock them; for, ostracized and ridiculed, they become martyrs in their own minds. Some people, when given a voice, have nothing to say but doomsday prophesies and bilious rhetoric, and, while I don't support gagging these bloodthirsty people, I do think that we should be more discerning about whose voices and opinions we might grant equivalence in public discourse.