Things do not get better, but worse

 

 

Partner and I saw the movie “2012” last year, with the neutrinos and the earthquakes and the continents slipping around like fried eggs in a buttered skillet.  Some nice special effects, but – meh.

 

 

But people do love to talk about the end of the world.

 

 

When I was a kid, the whole fundamentalist Christian end-of-the-world thing was going gangbusters. Hal Lindsay was explaining how Russia was Gog and Magog, and it all proved that the rapture was going to happen any day now!

 

 

And I had a Jehovah's Witness friend who told me, with perfect assurance, that the Apocalypse would begin in 1975.

 

 

You may recall, if you are old enough, that the Apocalypse did not begin in 1975.

 

 

This does not deter the end-of-the-world theorists.  It did happen, you see, but we didn't notice.  Something happened – something epochal, something horrible, something hidden – but we weren't aware of it.  How about the birth of the Antichrist?  That sounds suitably ominous . . .

 

 

Well, if he was born in 1975, the Antichrist should be 36 by now. Old enough to be out Antichristing, anyway. 

 

 

But he ain't.   All I see on the evening news is the usual weary human nastiness.  It's not good, but it's nothing new. 

 

 

You never know.  Maybe the world will get squashed by an asteroid this evening.  Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster will arrive and we'll all be saved.

 

 

But I don’t think the world will end with a bang.  I think it will slump and whimper its way downward toward the end, just the way it’s always done.

 

 

Cheerful, eh?

 

 

My title’s from a limerick by Edward Gorey, which I think would be very appropriate for my (or anyone's) tombstone:

 

 

A lady born under a curse

 used to drive forth each day in a hearse;

 From the back she would wail

 through a thickness of veil:

“Things do not get better, but worse.”