I have always had some sort of apocalyptic obsession. Maybe its not an obsession, but more of an affinity. My earliest memory of this affinity was a rather terrifying experience that I was subjected to at church camp....
The church camp I was forced to go to as a young child was in the beautiful mountains in a rural part of south western pennsylvania, either near or just over the Maryland border. My siblings and I were all expected to annually go to this camp, which was operated by the church that we were also expected to attend. Each respective age group from young children through teenagers spent a week there of almost militarily regimented activities. All of these activities, to my memory, were related to learning about God, with the exception of swimming, playing softball, and eating. The point of this story is that one of the earlier years of my attendance at church camp we were shown a movie about the coming of christ. I wish I knew the name of this propaganda film that had struck such fear into the entire chapel of 10-12 year olds that afterwards when asked if we would accept Jesus as our personal savior, most of us ran to front of the room.
The movie depicted a reality in which armageddon had come and swooped all the christians away in a beam of light. Those who remained behind were all tatooed with the number of the beast - 666 - and there was chaos, violence, and probably some semblance of a plot that I do not recall. What I do recall is the iconic windowless black vans that were also marked 666 and some kind of army of the beast that was responsible for all the bad stuff. I could be making all this up. But, I do remember clearly that I was scared shitless and thinking I better get with Jesus asap. I also remember having bad dreams about this movie in the years to follow, and no doubt the van element was partly responsible for my irrational assumption that windowless vans are only driven by rapists and murderers. (I also believe that was a subconscious part of my decision to by a windowless van using money from the New York State Council on the Arts many years later.)
I still don't know what it really means to accept Jesus into your heart, even though I have done it twice. After the scary movie was the first time, and the second was when I was baptized at age 14. Yes. The church my family is a part of believes that 14 is the age when you can 'understand' all this stuff and therefore they save membership rites, which included baptism by submersion. So, at 14, i was forced (expected) to be dunked into a large jacuzzi behind the choir pews in the front of the church in front of a crowd of onlookers and forced (expected) to admit, once again, that Jesus was the man for me.
I have since abandoned any faith in Christianity that I might have ever had, but I do still remember that movie. I don't think of it so much now as the religious propaganda that it was, nor do I really waste time criticizing the irony of using a fear tactic to coerce young kids away from their parents for the first time that it is right and moral to "accept jesus into their hearts". Rather, I understand my vivid memory of that film as an early fixation with the possibility of a 'post-apocalyptic' reality; a realization that the "end of the world" doesn't mean the total extinction of humanity or all beings for that matter, but that civilization as we know it is way that our lives are structured and contained now and in the short time since humans have been forming cities and importing food into them, but there are other ways of imagining our existence.
For probably a couple years now, I have been coming to the eventual conclusion that, indeed, this change is coming. We are not waiting for any sort of apocalypse. We are living it. It is more apparent than ever that our civilization rooted literally reliant to this day on different types of slavery - whether it be enslavement of fellow humans, or other resources, such as animals or oil. This is a unsustainable way to live. I know this. But, I, like many fellow humans, are addicted to technology, so it is very hard to a different world. We can imagine 'peace' and an end to famine and atrocities and global disarmament, but we cannot imagine a world where the exponential expansion of our technological reach comes to a grinding halt. I don't think it will come to a grinding halt. But I do think that within my life time (the next 50-60 years) we will see bigger change in the way we must live our lives than modern humans have ever known. With it, we will see a lot of death and likely continued violence.
A couple years ago, I read Octavia Butler's books the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Talents, a series of novels about a band of travelers lead by a strong and visionary woman. The books are set in what we might call post-apocalyptic times, but what struck me was the Butler's depiction of the way the state was functioning (or not functioning) in the not-too-distant future. I had always thought that the end of the State would be required in order for civilization to begin to collapse. However in Butler's 'Parables' there is still a government, and a president and a media - its just that there is no economy and no trust. Its a good story, and it has helped to shape my ideas about how things could realistically turn from the advanced technological state we all know and rely on now into a different world. Derrick Jensen talks a lot about this in Endgame. The overarching idea being that the speedier the transition to a more sustainable (uncivilized) way of living, the less death and destruction.
That's it for now, I plan to write more on this thread of civilization, technology, addiction, and apocaplypse, so stay tuned.
