Fatalist Attractions
I grew up watching some pretty grim stuff.
Red Dawn. The Seventh Sign. The Day After Tomorrow. This bible infomercial about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Land of the Lost. Well, that one wasn’t grim as much as it was strange. Oh, and The Exorcist. Was definitely too young to see that one.
As a late 70’s, early 80’s kid, I’m a proud, card-carrying GenXer, and those were the kinds of films and television shows available to us in those days. It was macabre viewing. Stuff about nuclear war, the end times according to the bible. Demonic possession.
I suppose we watched them because our parents didn’t care about ratings, and because that’s all that was on. There was no such thing as on-demand programming with unlimited viewing options.
Not only did these shows scare the heck out of us, they primed my generation to believe the end was near. We’ve always been fatalists, and so now, as the world is actually ending, we feel…fine, and we knew it was coming.
Wait, the world is ending, you ask?
Yes, the world is ending. Accept it.
Well, it’s not ending like it ended for Noah. The world won’t fill up with water after a huge storm.
The ending this time is much slower, more incremental. It’s essentially like the frog in the frying pan: turn the heat up ever so slowly and the frog won’t notice, eventually leading to its crispy, pan-fried death.
I know what you’re thinking: “This guy believes in global warming.”
Hell yeah I believe it.
I also believe the viruses will continue to mutate and resist vaccines. Nations will eventually be dragged into Putin’s very pointless war and the third one will happen. New York and D.C. could very definitely be obliterated. Despots (e.g. false messiahs) will be elected again and again.
Oh, and a comet will eventually smash us and be the icing on the melting cake.
And what will we do? Continue to sit at the pool scrolling our damned phones ordering Grub Hub and posting on Instagram.
I feel terrible for my children. Quite awful, actually. Their world will always be hot and disease ridden and war ravaged and trapped in an infotainment dictatorship.
People scoff at Elon Musk and Richard Branson jetting off into the stratosphere. If anything, those guys are the Magellan’s and Pizarro’s of this age looking at the razor edge of the horizon through theirs telescopes, willing to leave it all behind.
So what, do we sit here and pout? No. Although we GenXer’s are nihilists, we do have hearts. We do care for people. I mean, we also watched plenty after school specials and The Facts of Life. We did learn how to be good stewards of our immediate vicinity.
And that, mis amigos, is all we can do. Act locally. I mean like, extremely locally. As in your own home. Make radical change. Implement austerity. Don’t let it all slip away because you’re just not up for the challenge.
Don’t let it go because you’re too scared to act. One doesn’t just grow up watching The Exorcist and then not spend their lives willing to battle the devil.
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Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash
