Everywhere I go I find a pal

Peter Weinschenk, Editor, The Record-Review

The world is coming to an end too much these days.

Every other blockbuster movie you see advertised involves some end of the planet plot twist and newspaper headlines, whether about coronavirus or global warming, shout out about apocalypse-level destruction.

We even read the political news as an End of Days chronicle. For some, re-election of President Trump would be the End. For others, election of a Democrat will be a triumph of left-wing socialism, dooming the planet to tyranny.

What is going on here? Why are we so dramatic? Have we suddenly become tired of the planet? Are we so frustrated with the world’s problems that we would just as soon the earth explode in a ball of fire?

My advice is that we should cool it. An end of the world story line is basically a cop out. It gives us an excuse for not fixing the problems we face.

There is a basic problem with an End of the World narrative. It never happens. Thousands of prophets and mystics have predicted the end of the world. In every single case, they have been wrong.

Let’s review some of these predictions. French bishop Hilary of Pontius predicted the world would be consumed by fire in 365. He was wrong. Spanish monk Beatus of Liebana predicted the end of the world in 793. Wrong again. London astrologers predicted a great flood would sweep the world and convinced 20,000 in that city to seek higher ground. Nothing of the sort happened. Charles Piazzi Smyth predicted the end of the world between 1892 and 1911 based on the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Nope, that didn’t occur. And Louis Farrakhan in 1991 predicted the Gulf War would be the final war to end it all. It didn’t.

You’d think that people would give up on incorrectly predicting the end of the world. But they don’t. It continues to be a thriving industry.

I found an interesting end-of-the-world pop song on a Jackson Browne CD that had been bouncing around for a few months in my car. The song is “The Deluge” on the Late for the Sky album. The song tells the ironic story of an environmentalist group starting up a commune and, in their diffi cult, perhaps foolish work, the group is devasted by a massive, unpredicted flood. There is a line in the song that I particularly like. It’s the one where Browne counsels us to seek a wider perspective and to “let creation reveal its secrets by and by…” Here, Browne tells us that maybe we don’t understand everything about the earth, its problems and the future.

I find this inspiring. In our ignorance, we must persist. We have to work with the planet we have. That’s because the apocalypse is never the end. There is always a day after the apocalypse.