F**k the apocalypse

My good friend Chris Scheer -- author of "Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq" -- has something to say about the Chicken Littles of this world. Whether you agree with him or not, it asks us to think more seriously about the apocalyptic rhetoric that we sneer at when it comes from the Christian right, but eagerly embrace when touting our cause:

Fuck the Apocalypse. Seriously, it's bullshit. Fuck the one where God is coming to smite most of us, and fuck the one where the polar ice-caps melt and Nature is coming to smite most of us. It's all just morality-based negative wish-fulfillment.

If you want to say things are going to Hell in a hand-basket, fine. But it has always been thus. This is no school play, folks, it's a bunch of fragile survivors making life on a hot rock. Stop your grandiosity, stop believing you're at the absolute center of time and space. Believing the Apocalypse is upon us is just one gigantic ego trip.

In 10,000 years, whatever "intelligent" bunch of abstract thinkers still walks the planet will be mentioning the melting of the ice caps (which is real) with as much passion as my 6th graders recite the dates of the last Ice Age.

Rolling Stone, in an article subtly entitled "The End of the World, Part III," writes this month that:

The age of the International War on Terror seems to have turned itself into an unusually grim time in world history, an era of awesome and unforeseeable catastrophes, giant steps backward in the journey of civilization, ruinous and far-reaching political blunders and violently disillusioning confrontations with man's limitations. Even the most godless among us has to tremble before the biblical scale of the past twelve months' headlines: the tsunami that swallowed south Asia, the deadly lady named Katrina (also known as America Not Immune) and now this. We do not seem to be going forward very much, but every few months we lose, somewhere, a big piece of the world map, a mysterious and enervating process that is becoming like an ominously steady drip that can be heard all over the planet.

OK, first of all, south Asia was not "swallowed." It's outermost fringe was hit with a devastating wave. There are still a billion people living in India alone, and they would like you to know that not only were they not swallowed by a wave or a dragon or anything else, but they are still singing songs, making love and riding the bus to work today. And while it is surely awful that three million people are sleeping under tents after the earthquake in Pakistan, it is not the end of the world, in literal terms. After all, three million people is only five-ten-thousandths (.0005) of the Earth's population! A couple hundreds years ago, 3 million people would have been a lot. Now, as the Jewish kids say on TV say, not so much.

What is astonishing is not that the earth shakes and makes big waves and storms -- that's what it does, people -- but that 3 million people are managing to live at all in a barren land only the most highly adapted creatures would even attempt to make home, one famous for its horrific earthquakes, droughts and religious extremism. The whole story of human expansion is like an expedition to the South Pole: If one party gets wiped out along the way, another one is still going to try insanely the next season, as soon as we can trick some dogs into dragging us there.

Believe it: God is NOT coming and boy is he NOT pissed. Nature is NOT seeking revenge, and it is NOT broken. If the whole world turns into a giant, bubbling-hot ocean whirlpool, there will be bacteria that will be happily living off the thermal energy and waiting for the next wave of evolution. Nature will survive, even if we are not there to see it.

Things are the same as they ever were, and always changing. You say there was a tsunami that wiped out the flimsy villages of poor people and a hurricane that flooded an impoverished city people had been predicting would be flooded for 150 years. It turns out people are sometimes venal and lazy and that leads to tragedy, and not everybody acts well during a crisis, and being poor is hazardous to your health. You think?