The World Is Not Going To End This Year
Doom and gloom? No, grope for hope
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Very Unpopular Strong Opinions Blog by Christyl Rivers
It’s not the end until you admit it
Every year for about five, now, I’ve begun the year with what may be misinterpreted as a negative: It’s the end of the world!
Never mind that for just as many years, I have been proven right. The world continues to decline in myriad ways. It’s burning more, drowning more, sickening more, polarizing more, and most of all, losing all life support.
Never mind that for a moment.
Over the holidays we watched Don’t Look Up.
Mixed reviews, but overall, people who see the denial of all our fellow human beings found it spot on, hilarious, and terrifying.
This is why so many move reviewers did not know how to peg it.
When something is both funny and spectacularly disturbing, it’s hard to give a simple thumb’s up. Spoiler. Except for a few (unlikely to survive) baddi-mad-zillionaires, Earth is destroyed.
The Unraveling, albeit similar, which we are currently in, is different. Many people, including I, have repeatedly written that a doomsday that looks too much like a Tuesday is just hard to pay attention to in ways that we should be doing.
Every day, somewhere on the planet, a fire breaks out. A flood. A famine. A few more extinct species. But, as we are distracted by our own lives, our own hopes for “mining that comet” (right now for cryptocurrency) we don’t know. Or, worse, we don’t care.
Learning to care is the hard part. Learning that the end of the world is not some cataclysmic oncoming fireball, but an on-going death by a trillion cuts situation, is challenging for our psyches.
The world is not going end this year. The world, the constantly dying, constantly reborn, world, is not going to end in any year (of human measure). However, our need to reconnect to one another, to snap out of denial, to find our belonging is going to happen to some of us, and sadly, is going to leave many others forsaken.
On a Tuesday.
