The Rapture

I get one or two epiphanies a year, moments of higher brain function than my normal high school teaching slog requires, coming almost always at the end of a semester or on a break from the grind when my mind is otherwise unoccupied.  Epiphany is a strange thing, equal parts inspiration and ephemera, but I had to share this:

End of the world movies and stories are not the self-fulfilling prophecies of a species lucid enough to know it's killing itself and the planet, but too drunk to care.  Rather, they are a very perverse kind of wish, a certain desire to have every trapping of modern life, the cars, the toys, the clothes, the food, the shit, without quite so many people.  That's how fucked up we are as a species.  We know it's the cars that are killing us, so we rationalize that if there were simply fewer of us, we could all drive Hummers.  Think about it for a second, all the disaster movies (from Zombieland to The Road, the comic to the tragic) have this thing is common--not everyone dies.  This was the most absurd part of I Am Legend, the part that made it so much less appealing than Omega Man.  The later ends with mother and son survivors finding a "safe-town", complete with white church steeple, suburban streets and plenty of gun and ammo.  The message is clear--there was nothing wrong with the way we were living, there were just too many of us.

Disaster films suggest that all we really need to do is find some way of killing off 99% of the world's population, after which, we can go back to eating bacon and watching Shrek.  Sure it's a heavy price to pay for the 99%, but they'll either go quickly, or turn to zombies and wouldn't we really rather be dead at that point anyway?  Fuck population control, sustainable energy, cleaning up the rivers and lakes, getting rid of nuclear waste, what we really need is a bad mutant virus to escape from a secret government lab.  Sure, there will be the unpleasant period of time when we are eating each other and cooking babies, but it will pass and there will be a family, complete with dog, who live in the woods to take us in.  Then we can start all over.

This shit we feed ourselves is not some masochistic, self-flagellation we have imposed on ourselves; it's our escape plan.  Deep in our American psyche lie buried a simple thought: the freeways and the planes and the "food" we eat would all be fine if there were far fewer drivers, fliers and buffet lines.  God forbid we should examine whether in fact we are living the good life.  It's far easier to imagine, long for, a hundred different calamities that could do for us what we are too fat, too stupid and too lazy to do for ourselves.  At the end of the day, what we see in disaster movies is what we truly want--99 out of 100 of our fellow earthlings to die.  It beats giving up the Lexus.