Praying for the End of Time

I believe in the end of the world. Maybe it's a metaphor for the end of my own life, that is, the end of my world. And naturally speaking, we all meet our own end. Maybe I'm just sick of the political season, and how it tends to rip open old scars. But my gut feels that there's an end approaching that is larger than just me and the Maya. And I'm starting to long for it.

When I read about the old lady in Pennsylvania who told Joe Biden this past weekend that "Anybody...with a name like that is not going to get my vote. It'd be disgusting to get a man named Barack Obama as president of the United States."

Disgusting.

She went on to repeat the lie: "[Obama's] a Muslim. He pretends to be a Christian, and he isn't, he's a Muslim."

Also interviewed was the local Democratic ward leader, who was quite forthright in explaining that the reason people in his traditionally Democratic neighborhood were not yet on board with Obama is "his color." The business manager for the local ironworkers union agreed.

A lot of my family lives in Pennsylvania, and to be frank, a lot of them are Muslim-fearing racists. This sad fact is something that I have to shield from my son. It's something I'm embarrassed about. It reminds me why there's a distance between me and much of my family. When I read quotes like this in the Daily News, I make this association, I think of my own family, and I realize just how deeply wrong this whole country is. People are immeasurably stupid and hateful, not just in Pennsylvania, but everywhere in America. They are reveling in their own giddy ignorance, righteously falling in line behind the war hero while at once saving the nation from the infiltration of a "secret Muslim" and putting the black man back in his place.

During this election season, we have heard a lot about the progress we've made as a people in the hundred and forty-odd years since the end of slavery and the 88 years since women's suffrage. But that progress has detoured away from many small towns, arriving mainly in the big cities, the liberal-arts colleges, and the kinds of churches which are generally derided as "liberal." Rural Wasilla, AK elected a woman mayor, but her conservative values led her to secure $27 million in federal earmarks for her small town, and still leave it $20 million in debt. Plus she was keen on banning books from the public library.

Back in Pennsylvania, intelligent design was exposed for what it is (due to those insidious activist judges), but the fact that this challenge came from a school south of Harrisburg was not lost on me. The state has been described as Philadelphia on one side and Pittsburgh on the other with Alabama in the middle. Is this insulting to Alabamans?

But getting back to the end of the world, I must say I welcome it. This country, this world, this species, has run its course. The planet knows it. We are locked in a death grip with our own environment. We have found multiple ways to destroy ourselves and everything else, from complex multinational death machines like nuclear weapons and the Disney Corporation to simple lifestyle choices like carbon fuels and Lunchables. Each one of these human inventions contributes to the rolling ball of thunder which now darkens our doorstep. Come armageddon, come armageddon, come. America, I swore I'd love you to the end of time. And now I'm praying for the end of time.

The slate deserves to be wiped clean, because the writing on the wall is disgusting.