I was driving yesterday down I-95 South in Connecticut, coming back from a weekend of Mothers Day family whathaveyou, and I must have seen five or six billboards advertising the end of the world as May 21, 2011. You’d think by now that kind of thing would sell itself and wouldn’t need the marketing push, but whatever.
The group behind the May 21, 2011 “endtime prophecy” is called Family Radio, and it’s headed by a man named Harold Camping. One should note that Family Radio isn’t actually on the radio. They’re on the Internet, like every other nutso terror group out there from the KKK to Al Qaeda. And they claim to have “infallible proof” that the Christian rapture—the second coming of Jesus Christ and his taking all the saved souls to heaven while the rest of us heathens endure unbearable hell on Earth—is now less than two weeks away.
That proof? Well, it’s down to some selective Bible reading that says May 21 is exactly 7,000 years to the day since the Great Flood—Noah, animals; Steve Carrell was in a movie about it—and that 7,000 years is like a week and Noah had a week to warn people about the end of the world so here we are and May 21 is the end of the world. Don’t think about it too hard or your head will start to hurt. Believe me.
As ever, though, it comes down to the same wacky Christian shit. Blah blah blah the Jews are back in Israel, blah blah blah hate the gays, blah blah blah general moral decay of society, on and on. It’s like Harold Camping has the Crazy Jesus Freak Apocalypse playbook and is just reading down the list.
Here’s a sample from the Family Radio website: “No sign is as dramatic and clear as the phenomenal world-wide success of the Gay Pride movement. In the Bible God describes His involvement with this dramatic movement.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. I know these people aren’t exactly working on a logical basis, but even so, don’t you think that they could have come up with something better than that Sodom and Gomorrah horseshit by now? How long has it been that they’ve been spewing out the same lines?
It’s not like it would be hard to look around the world and see some apocalyptic shit happening, what with all the war, natural disasters, starvation, child soldering, Apple market domination, etc. But nope, it’s still the gays. Sure, radiation from a Japanese power plant has circled the earth, but it’s the dudes who like to make out with dudes and the chicks who like to make out with chicks who are the most definite sign of the end of the world. Yeah, polar ice caps are melting, oceans are rising, there’s a giant island of garbage in the Pacific and every year it becomes just a little easier to get a sunburn, but I think we all know it’s guy-on-guy anal that’s signaling the destruction of humanity. You gotta be fucking kidding me.
Camping’s not the first and he won’t be the last, and here’s the thing no one ever says about the end of the world: You’re not that special. You know that “decline” that you see happening all around you? Well, it’s been happening since the dawn of civilization and we’re all still here. The time you want to go back to doesn’t exist and your life isn’t worthy of the meaning the apocalypse would give it. You wish you were that important, or that things were that simple, or that life was so easy to explain.
Because how convenient would it be? Oh, well, life must have meant something, because it ended and here we are in heaven blowing trumpets with our asses or whatever it is you do all day for eternity. Life keeps going. That’s what it means. And until a giant red sun burns the planet to a crisp and eats the dusty remnants billions of years from now, or until a giant rock falls out of the sky and turns our atmosphere into fire, I’m not going to believe any of this garbage, no matter how much more homosexuality is portrayed in a vaguely positive light in popular media.
People aren’t stupid. Just the loud ones.
Nah, strike that. People are stupid.
Praying for rain,
JJ Koczan
jj@theaquarian.com
