Days of doom: Are we living in end times?

It’s a biological fact: we’re all going to die.
We hope it’s after a long life filled with love and lollipops, but we sometimes fantasize about all of us biting the dust at once.
The end of the world as we know it. Poof. Gone.
Just glancing at the headlines, it seems some end-of-times prophesy is playing out. The world is erupting into mayhem. Japan has been torn asunder by an earthquake of enormous enormity, leaving nuclear clouds swirling among the wreckage. Our prez is dropping O’bomb’as on Libya, bringing us into our third major armed conflict in the past decade. The economy is still in the minor leagues; we could soon be transformed to the same poor, huddled masses we were when arriving on the shores of this brave new continent.
Tsunamis! Terrorists! Hurricanes!
War! Floods! Glenn Beck!
Behold a pale horse.
The end is nigh.
It is hard to digest all of these events, especially when they come in such rapid succession. Our only solace in the American Midwest is that they are only headlines. The biggest complaint around here these days is a spring snowstorm.
But the headlines are truly disturbing. My heart goes out to the Japanese earthquake victims, the Libyans fighting against the mad king Quaddafi (or however he’s spelling his name these days) and the growing numbers of unemployed who are having a hard time paying the mortgage (if they still have a house).
When bad events clump together like this, we can’t help but looking at them in the big picture. We get scared. We become paranoid. Is it starting? Doomsday? Armageddon? The Final Judgment?
Unfortunately, more people believe in this kind of garbage than you’d think. When I worked at bookstores for three or so years right after college, I directed too many honest, hardworking folks to the aisle where the insanely popular “Left Behind” series of books were shelved. The 16 books in the series, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, deal with a Christian take on the end of the world. The Antichrist, and all that jazz. I don’t know anything else about them. I wouldn’t deign to read the plot summaries on the back covers, let alone crack their spines.
Just this past fall, a strange flyer began appearing on doorsteps in Manistee with the title “Prophetic Revelations” printed boldly at the top. There were drawings of several strange beasts on the cover: a giant, red dragon-serpent with spikes and horns, a fierce-looking bear with human bones in its mouth, a roaring lion with wings and a three-headed cheetah, also with wings.
At first, I thought it was advertising a “stoner art” drawing class, the kind that specialize in copying heavy metal album covers. It wasn’t. At the bottom of the flyer it read, “A Bible Seminar on the Beasts and Our Future.” There were six lectures about understanding revelation planned in the area.
Really?
I didn’t attend so I don’t know if we’ll have to contend with flying lions in the future or not. I hope so. It’s the kind of pet I dreamed of having when I was five.
The Manistee film industry is also in the mix. What you may not know about the movies that are being shot in and around town are that most of them are “faith-based,” which in America generally means Christian. At least one of the flicks, “Jerusalem Countdown,” has an end times aspect to it.
This begs the question: why are Christians so hot for total annihilation these days? Is the end of the world some new trend, like Pokemon? There are books, movies and seminars. Are “rapture” action figures far behind?
The truth is, thinking about the end of the world dates to the beginning of the world. Logically, everything that has a beginning has an end, right?
Every culture and religion has had its own end times mythologies. We know from umpteen History Channel specials that the Mayan calendar calls for the grand event in 2012, which is only nine months away. More contemporary religions (Christianity, Islam) have their intricacies, but it always comes down to being judged while hellfire rains from the sky. Secular liberals have their own science-based narrative, usually involving evil corporations denuding the world of trees, killing the whales and polluting the environment with carbon. The greenhouse gases will bake us, the oceans will swell and swallow up the coastlines and we’ll all be exterminated for our dirty deeds.
The end of the world is scary. It’s action-movie huge. It’s tidy. It’s complete. It’s final. It’s dramatic.
But the notion should be regarded as what it is: entertainment.
It’s strange that no scenarios really exist of the world dying naturally, peacefully, while asleep. The large, cataclysmic events feed our imaginations.
What’s actually going on in the world should never be looked at in the same lens. These are real people suffering real events, right there out their windows and on their streets.
It’s a concept best dealt with in Hollywood movies, not in real life.
But when it does go down, I’ll be long gone, flying into the sunset on my three-headed cheetah.