Among aging’s gifts are perspective and the ability to laugh at the world’s ridiculousness.
Kerfuffle and blah blah blah about tomorrow’s supposed “Rapture” made me wonder–how many end-of-the-world scenarious have I lived through in my 63 years?
A quick Google shows that predicting the end of the world (as we know it?) has been a popular passtime for theologians and self-proclaimed “prophets” since humanity figured out how to record our harebrained ideas.
Jim Jones predicted the end of the world in ’67, when I was five. Impatient to hurry Armageddon along, he took the lives of 918 souls in ’78. I remember walking past The People’s Temple building in San Francisco not long after and feeling a palpable chill.
I have vague memories of warnings that Comet Kohoutek’s visit in ’74 heralded the end. It didn’t.
I recall another doomsday prediction in 1980, my high school graduation year. I was working at a 7-11 at the time, and figured if the world was about to end, I might as well try smoking, so I bought a pack of Virginia Slims menthols because the packaging was pretty. Turns out smoking is vile. Glad that habit didn’t stick. Woke up the next morning and tossed the cigs.
In ’86, Halley’s Comet was supposed to pull the earth out of orbit and send us to our icy doom.
Another comet in ’97, Hale-Bopp, and another cult’s mass suicide. Sad.
In ’99, folks were talking about Nostradamus’s prediction. Nada.
Then there’s the whole Y2K madness. In the summer of 1999, my daughter was six, and despite not being particularly religious, I enrolled her in Vacation Bible School after friends assured me it’d be a fun and sane experience–basically day camp with arts and crafts, games, and songs about Jesus. In preparation for a solar eclipse, we helped the kids make eclipse viewers out of cardboard boxes. Remember those?
Everything was hunky dory until the base chaplain (We were on an Army base in Germany) came to pray with the kids before the eclipse. He started, “Children, this may truly be the End Times…” My daughter was six. I saw red. How effin’ dare he scare those kids?! Thus ended our family’s association with the base chapel.
We held a big New Year’s Eve party on Dec. 31, 1999. A great time was had by all, and we woke up hungover but alive. The internet hadn’t crashed; neither had the economy. No planes fell out of the sky either. Talk about anticlimactic.
Remember 2012? Ancient Mayans supposedly predicted the end of the world. Turns out folks weren’t so great at reading Ancient Mayan, because that’s not really what they said, but my high school students seized on that as an excuse to avoid homework. I gave them a pass that day.
In ’13, it was Rasputin’s predictions people were buzzing about. In 2015, it was the Blood Moon. Both duds.
And now we’re facing yet another Rapture prediction.
I’m no scientists, and I’m certainly no theologian, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the end of the world for humankind will be/is a slow process. We may well be in the thick of it now. No heavenly fanfare, no monsters rising from the deep to gobble our cities, just strife, hatred, and abuse of the planet.
Is it too late for us to save ourselves? I don’t know. But I’m betting all my neighbors will still be here Wednesday.
