SHUTTING OFF HUMAN EXISTENCE

by Mr. Mean-Spirited

 

If there were some button that would end the world, I am going to be pressing so hard that I might break the bone in my finger.   If there were some switch that would terminate all life, I am going to hit that lever so fast that I might snap my thumb.

But there is no knob to shut off this horror of existence.  What scares me most is that there will never be any end to human subsistence.

I grew-up with etchings that celebrated the ravage and wreck of Armageddon – and those engravings of the Apocalypse yielded a sense of serenity because I imaged that there might soon be an end to my own personal suffering.  I found a calm, quiet relief in the knowledge that there might be a kill switch to the human species.   But now I feel apprehensive that I will not witness the final reckoning.

Government is not going to be overthrown, just ever more intolerable.   This despotic diversity is never going to diminish because of some new piece of legislation; this totalitarian tolerance will never be defeated by a change in politicians.   Each year, things are going to get a touch more liberal; popular culture will become a tinge more degenerate; the policeman’s tap on the shoulder is going to be tad more insistent.  Individualists will continue to be persecuted for not being kind enough.  The independent citizen will always be punished for not being nice enough.  In the next decade, things will get a bit more egalitarian for your neighbors – and a lot less equal for you.  As society becomes ever more compassionate, freedom will become ever more constricted.

It is not the Last Days that frightens me – what I fear most is that there might be no end to this life.  I am afraid that this gradual social decay might well continue until I finally die off.  I grew up hearing about the end of the world – and I was praying, I was pleading for this destruction.  But now I think that this long-promised collapse will never come – that things will continue in this slow decline until the end of my days.  This, to me, is more dissipating than any Judgment Day.  The greatest horror is that things will just muddle on.

I was hoping that the nuclear weapons industry might help end this nightmare, but all the warmongers turned coward on us.  I had faith in a global pestilence, but viral evolution is letting us down.   I’ve still got my money on a good old-fashioned famine, but mass starvation takes its own sweet time

There is no greater anguish than the knowledge that there will never ever be any end to the agony.  If there was once pain, you will feel it over and over again.