Somehow or other, I found myself having a conversation this morning with my husband about the end times. You know, the end of the world, the apocalypse. Randomly, it just came up. My husband feels as though the end times are coming soon, that we are living in the last days. However, I feel that the end times probably won't exist unless and until we physically blow up our planet with nuclear bombs.
So the argument we had is, (a very friendly and civil argument, no worries) is the world we live in worse now than it has ever been? Do we have more war, more upheaval, more economic distress, more natural catastrophes, more man-made destruction on our planet than we ever have before? His argument was yes, we are destroying the earth and ourselves in ways like no other civilization has. Look at our wars, our pollution, the disparity between rich and poor, the way that the world economy is collapsing before our very eyes.
My opinion was that no, we are not living in a world that is truly any different than any other time in human history. People are always the same; they are always destroying themselves and the world around them. It just looks different now, because we have different resources available with which to accomplish our destruction. I said, look back a thousand years at the dark ages, the Crusades, the Black Death.
My main argument was that we don't ever have an accurate perspective on history. We always feel so big and important and all-knowing in whatever place and time and civilization we are in, but we can never truly see and understand what came before us or what lies ahead. We have ideas about it, we have words that have been passed down, we have these vague history lessons that hit on all the key points, but can we really imagine what it would have been like to be alive a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago? If we could gain that kind of perspective, would we still believe that our world now is so dangerous? Would we be so upset about our hurricanes and earthquakes, our pollution, our economic turmoil, our climate change, our melting ice-caps, our current civilization's penchant for criminal activity, corruption, drug use and violence?
Would we really believe the end times were coming now if we could truly know what it had been like to live through the Dark Ages, seen people dying all around us from the Black Death (at least a third of Europe's population within six years), lived in fear of the Crusaders roaming the countryside looking for non-Catholics to convert or kill?
My husband could very well be right, and the current popular interpretation of the Bible prophesies could be accurate. Maybe the end of the world will occur during our lifetimes, but I'm just not sure.
But maybe the end of the world happens over and over again on our planet, every time a generation or a culture decides to destroy itself. Perhaps every time a nation chooses war over peace, that is an end time. Maybe when the people of the world stand by and watch a genocide happening without stepping in to provide safe harbor, that is an end time. And maybe it's possible that every time a person dies on the street, in the slums, with nothing, that is an end time because someone, somewhere could have been there, could have chosen to love that person, could have chosen to help that person.
Maybe the end times happen every day, every time a person forgets what being human means and slips back into behaving like an animal. So perhaps every time I am more important than you, I am creating an end time.
The hope in all this, if this is so, is that we can choose differently, each of us; we can choose whether we live in the end or whether we create beginnings. We can choose to tear down or to build. We can choose our own personal war or peace. We can choose between humanity or our own base animal instinct.
I choose to believe in this hope.
