Waiting for the End of the World

Everybody still here?

We've all had fun awaiting the imminent non-destruction of the world. REM has probably collected more royalties in the last week than they have at any time since "Losing My Religion" appeared on an album that people couldn't yet download. Blondie and Barry McGuire did well, too, we suppose.

We all waited for Judgment Day, a day when we would be wracked by monstrous earthquakes and devastating tsunamis, or, as they call it in Japan, Saturday. (Too soon?) Unsurprisingly, Judgment Day has apparently not come.

It's easy to be snarky at a time like this. A little too easy, actually. What would a non-snarky response to today's non-events look like?

The vast majority of the population took easy potshots at Harold Camping and his acolytes who believed the world would end today, May 21, 2011. Even the high-minded paper of record headlined its article on our impending doom, "Make My Bed? But You Say the World's Ending." We, too, had a good laugh or two about the whole thing. But how ridiculous was the prophecy, really?

After all, a large number of mainstream, non-lunatics--ordinary Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others--believe in the eventual arrival of a messiah who will in one way or another bring about the end of days. What makes the Harold Campings of the world crazier than these folks?Specificity? For that matter, strictly speaking, Harold Camping and his followers were not wrong. When today comes and goes, won't THEIR world as THEY know it have, in fact, come to an end?

Also we can't help but notice, amidst all the levity about the failed Armageddon, a certain disappointment, and not just from those who expected to be raptured. Those of a more secular bent, too, must feel at least a small letdown. And why wouldn't we? Look at the world: wars, economic uncertainty, disease, natural disasters. Who wouldn't, on some level, welcome cataclysmic change?

When Monday morning rolls around, and people drag themselves out of bed to face another week of the same old same old, more than a few will daydream about how things might have been different, and more than a few will wonder if it really would have been all that bad.