Brave new world
We must be excused to wonder if all this talk about the end of the world is nothing more than a gimmick to sell guns. the regular cable TV fare seems to indicate it. And while guns are always a charming toy to contemplate and play with, there will be times when contemporary American popular culture simply brings it to sickening lows.
But what can you do? The children are still too young to keep from watching “Walking Dead 3” and real life TV fare like “Doomsday Preppers”. Even so, the extensive collection of features on the impending apocalypse were nothing if not interesting. Another take on Nostradamus always found itself an audience. And why not, if it could complement such cues as Mayan calendar and alien invasion? We must wonder if all these will end now?
Likely not. Years ago in the 70s, The Doors’ Jim Morrison was already rocking,”…this is the end, my only friend, the end…” And we would all miss it too much.
What will we think of next for a 2013 apocaplypse? Not to worry. Something is bound to come along. For if one were to really see into the constructs of our seeming obsession with the end, one might see it is only a reflection of the inevitable anxieties which accompanies all life in general.
The possibilities for drawing metaphors between personal and collective fears are endless. Global warming, a new ice age, global pandemic, worldwide economic collapse are part of the landscape of our collective consciousness. How is one supposed to react to all these fears? If you believe TV, buy a gun and wait.
But since the world did not end in 2012 then we can at least sit back and relax if only for a while. On the other hand who can say with certainty that indeed the world did not end as predicted. Perhaps it did end. We just do not know it yet. For who is to say that the mechanisms for our collective doom or doom’s opposite has not already begun?
And then one might contemplate if every day we wake up from night into a new morning, we do not wake into what one author called “a brave new world”, day one of the next epoch. And things will be entirely different from here on. The world as we know it is no more.
And its passing might have been marked by the most insignificant events. Such as when your phone conks out on Christmas eve taking with it all your contacts. Or as when you wake up on new year’s eve only to find your laptop gone possibly for the rest of time. And all your life is there. Will your back-up work? Are your files still there? And now Kinutil will have to written from an iPad.
Ah, it will not kill you if you do not allow it to. Every ending is only a new beginning of something. That much is so plain it must have come out in a song already. As kinutil sings to you now: Happy day one!
