The Anti-Rapture

May 21, 2011 came and went, and the world did not end. According to radio evangelist, Harold Camping, the end was supposed to begin at 6 PM, marked by a series of cataclysmic events, and the rapture, when 200 million faithful would ascend to heaven. That did not happen. Instead, we got jokes.

Of course, most sane people knew the world would not end - would not even begin to end. But you might be surprised at how many "sane" people hoped something would happen - not in their backyards, certainly, but on the other side of the world; perhaps on the other side of the country (as though the floods and tornadoes were not enough.)

These people hoped - not out of cruelty, nor out of schadenfreude (malicious glee), but out of a genuine hope that this world, this species called "man" would be shakened to a new consciousness of itself and what it is doing. It did not happen.

So, man's inhumanity against himself continues. As Sonny Corleone so famously put it: "They hit us, so we hit 'em back." Yes, Sonny, ad infinitum. And the ravaging goes on - the human rights abuses, war crimes, sexual assaults, missiles - missiles galore - retributions, and indifference. Nothing short of a cataclysm can end it, and even that is no certainty. Perhaps nothing less than the total destruction of the human species will end it, so that all remains is those simple earthlings we call "animals" - they who have shown they know how to co-exist for millions of years where we complex ones fail in a few thousand.

If man's rapture is seen as 200 million faithful ascending to heaven, Earth's rapture must be when all seven billion of us ascend at once, and forever. No other cataclysmic event necessary.