{"id":38912,"date":"2011-05-21T06:19:27","date_gmt":"2011-05-21T11:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=38912"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:01:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:01:00","slug":"on-being-left-behind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/on-being-left-behind\/","title":{"rendered":"On Being Left Behind"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s the Big Day. Perhaps you’re reading this just prior to the 6 pm upheaval-slash-earthquake-cum-devastation heading our way. Well, prepare yourself for another of those impending “last” days for the True Believers. Surprisingly, a lot of otherwise-reasonable people seem anxious to jump ship today, anticipating that glorious grand-slam of religious extravaganzas, the Rapture.<\/p>\n

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With a Disneyesque panache that reminds me of Mary Poppins, bumbershoot in hand, the saved (both dead and alive) will be lifted up into heaven to side-step the horrors of the five-month tribulation ahead. As I traded my fundamentalist credentials for an ephemeris decades ago, I don’t expect to be leaving, myself, but then again, from the larger perspective, it’s doubtful that anyone else will be either.<\/p>\n

This is another of the end-of-days prophecies that we seem to delight in, a-twitch with secret shivers of anticipation. I don’t understand the need for such things-that-go-bump fear-mongering, but it’s easy enough to recognize what ignites it. We knew the heat would be turned up under that scenario when the fish began to die mysteriously and birds dropped out of the sky by the thousands. These qualify as signs and portents, especially to a culture that has scrapped its respect for scientific theory; such dramatic signs and portents dovetail nicely with the latest prediction for doomsday, despite an earlier version (1994) that failed to manifest due to “fuzzy math.”<\/p>\n

An elderly radio-preacher in Oakland, CA named Harold Camping has reconfigured the calculations according to his own version of Bible code and convinced his followers that today’s the day, to be followed by five excruciatingly hellish months until the world’s final end on October 21, 2011. Maybe he’s just trying to best the 2012 predictions. Today’s prophecy is not officially sanctioned by mainstream fundies, who are more in line with Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth<\/em> — the apocalyptic vision that jump-started the evangelical movement in 1970 and can justifiably be blamed for much Christocratic politics today \u2013 as well as with Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind<\/a><\/em> series of end-times fictions. Hal and Tim won’t give an exact time for Christ’s return, although they do suggest you purchase After The Rapture Pet Care<\/a> insurance so your household critters will be well-attended by the newly-damned in post-rapture America. (Yes, seriously, and consider that your WTF for the day.)<\/p>\n

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Polls show that a majority of Americans believe that Jesus will soon return to exact a fiery day of judgment, so this kind of fear-fest is to be expected and never fails to get attention, although this particular prophesy seems to have captured more than its share of eyes and ears. Cable television is studiously covering the event. We can lay some of that to our nervousness about the environment and a decade of weather patterns becoming more and more unpredictable, until now we simply expect them to be extreme, and they seldom fail us.<\/p>\n

Indeed, writing this at mid-day, the Midwestern sky is near-black with storm clouds today, thunder rolling again and downpours filling swollen rivers, swamping roads and fields. The last few weeks have given us flood stages unseen in decades<\/a>, and little towns along the Mississippi levees have been sacrificed to protect larger ones. Not far to the west, Texas is suffering drought, punctuated by over 10,000 wildfires since November of last year. While I have to struggle to feel sorry for Texas, that’s a lot of fires, lost dreams and property damage for folks already put upon by depressed financial times. Meanwhile, months of unseasonal tornadoes have already done billions in damage<\/a> to the plains and southern states, with accompanying loss of life. Just announced, the pending hurricane season is projected to be the worst in decades. If this is our new reality, it’s easy enough to believe it’s some kind of punishment for past sins, real or imagined.<\/p>\n

It would be helpful if we weren’t suckers for these scary projections. Historically, our past is littered with prophets pointing fingers and scaring the children (in all of us.) Way back when the cultured world rested mostly on shifting sand, we had Noah, Abraham and Moses, all qualified fire-and-brimstone prophets assumed to possess a direct link to the deity. Jesus is also considered a prophet (and to his faithful, the Only Begotten Son.). Centuries later, the Muslims give JC a respectful nod, but he yields to Muhammad as their final prophet.<\/p>\n

A word about religious prophets as opposed to secular: religions tend to seize on what they think is the final iteration of any insightful transcendent experience, which is inevitably when the authenticity of the movement begins to fade. Less personal faith would be required if we sought our own religious experience rather than trying to reclaim that of another. Church founders never seem to learn that the spiritual experience can not be duplicated and is ever-evolving, which is why prophecy still has the ability to impress and impact us so powerfully.<\/p>\n

Nostradamus, Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce are all considered remarkable prophets of their time, their psychic predictions still studied today. There are good prophets and bad, of course, factoring in the influence of cult-leaders Jim Jones, David Koresh, Sun Yung Moon and the like. More often than not, this last group manipulates events to make their predictions happen, with bells and whistles to enhance their own credibility. They’re excellent PR men, if dangerously cynical, but that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it.<\/p>\n

Some prophets start out inspired and then get sidetracked. In the 1980s, Elizabeth Claire Prophet and her Church Universal and Triumphant was a growing international New Age movement until Elizabeth began to prophesy nuclear war between the superpowers and moved her group of believers into austere underground facilities near Yellowstone Park. Not long after, Elizabeth was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and retired to live another ten years in a care facility. Four of her five children denounced her work; the fifth doesn’t comment.<\/p>\n

We don’t even need a religious context to get ourselves frothed up about dire projections. We all remember Y2K when the predictions flew fast and furious, Wall Street and the banking industry the likely storm-front (and proving just a tad off, an entire presidential-administration early.) The Republican party assumes an air of authority in prediction, capitalizing on anticipation of horrors-to-come to keep their base fed raw meat; of course almost none of its predictions comes true. We haven’t become Socialists, Obama hasn’t changed the national religion to Islam, and their profitable insurance, managed care and pharmaceutical companies have not been devastated by pending ‘Obamacare.’ The Pubs are mostly failed prophets, but their true believers keep right on marching us steadily toward the edge of their ideological cliff.<\/p>\n

Suckers. We’re suckers for this end-times stuff; there’s even a word for it: eschatology. We make movies about it, we speculate long into the night about what might happen, Road Warrior-style. We look at what isn’t working today and skim through our memory banks to select an old scenario to cover new possibilities. We’re better at summoning old solutions than creating new ones, which is where we most often fail one another. What if, when hard times assault us, we all worked together instead of pulling into ourselves and self-protecting? A no-brainer scenario, sharing food, shelter, sustenance along with the work to produce it as we did in centuries past, but that’s the last thing we think of. Instead we anticipate chaos and violence, pulling out our survivalist guide and small arms manual to prepare for dog-eat-dog conflict.<\/p>\n

Frankly, it’s hard for me not to consider these unsettling speculations part of our ego-need, drama-queenness and never-ending search for entertainment. Think Schwarzenegger and Stallone. We just love to scare the bejesus out of ourselves, shiver in the night, revel in dark imaginings. Alfred Hitchcock, grand master of suspense, understood that we are never far from our childhood insecurities when he said, “Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf.”<\/p>\n

Perhaps the understanding that there’s always something out there waiting to eat us is encoded in our mammalian DNA, keeping us twitchy. But what can we say about the perverse pleasure we take in imagining it? Hitch capitalized on our addiction to that pleasure with a string of brilliant movies; teasing us, he said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” We love the anticipation.<\/p>\n

There’s something darker behind that motivation, of course: a self-hatred that is not only difficult to find within our conscious selves but almost impossible to admit. A Course In Miracles<\/em> identifies guilt as that which quietly drives our projections, our nihilism and our self-judgment. We have designed our entire philosophy of life around a need to cover our flaws, even as our old paradigm religions tell us that we are flawed beyond our ability to fix ourselves, that we are essentially helpless and hopeless unless some outside influence redeems us. The price of that redemption is most often paid in religious obedience and unwavering density of thought. And the prayer wheel spins.<\/p>\n

It is only when we begin to consider, and experience, that we are not separate from God, from one another, from every good thing as well as every bad, that we begin to let go of childhood frights and fantasies. Until we do, peace remains just out of reach, and punishing end-times scenarios designed by angry gods fill our guilt-filled thoughts. Our search for ourselves must be rooted in a growing discovery of our own innate divinity.<\/p>\n

One last note on the religious aspect of this as well as the psychosocial. Some of us here have discussed the awkward embarrassment of being punked, these last few weeks. Great satire has crossed the boundary into increasingly outlandish realities to make us all scratch our heads from time to time. While it may seem absurd to us, some people have invested their life savings with the Reverend Camping, some have quit their jobs or left their families. That kind of misplaced faith is frightening, certainly, but it requires compassion of us, not derision. We separate ourselves from our human family at our own risk. We need to be very gentle with one another on May 22.<\/p>\n

I’ll issue one disclaimer: should the old preacher’s projections prove true in any way, I can’t help but imagine the return of a secular political reality to be a vast improvement over what we suffer today. The relief would be palpable, like kicking off too-tight shoes. Under those circumstances, I wouldn’t mind being left behind in the least. I much prefer the Baha’i vision<\/a> of our collective future, shared by many of the New Age philosophies. And as always, love must lead the way.<\/p>\n

As to the enormous bullshittery of a philosophy that leaves your pets (not to mention your neighbors) behind, I endorse this classic and beloved Twilight Zone that puts the matter squarely to rest. Take the time to load these YouTubes<\/a> and give your heart a little massage today, as we all get Left Behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves It’s the Big Day. Perhaps you’re reading this just prior to the 6 pm upheaval-slash-earthquake-cum-devastation heading our way. Well, prepare yourself for another of those impending “last” days for the True Believers. Surprisingly, a lot of otherwise-reasonable people seem anxious to jump ship today, anticipating that glorious grand-slam of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38912"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38912\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}