brainpanhandler wrote:Twyla LaSarc wrote:It would be a teeny, tiny, hardly worth mentioning at all bit less bad if there weren't humans out there who would be happy to start the whole process with the hope of either riding it out in a box and ruling the world after or being raptured up to relish the punishment of the damned and then ruling the world after.
I've taken the liberty of rewriting this bit above for you, which you should feel free to be incensed about if you wish, mainly because even though I share your dislike of those who wish to rule the world and by extension wish to force the survivors of the great holocaust to live as they believe humans ought to, nonetheless, a mass extinction of the human species would be a truly terrible thing. I don't think we should burn the whole house down to get rid of a few cockroaches.
Hell, I hardly get incensed over anything anymore- a few weeks spent dancing with /b/tards thickens the ol' skin a bit.

I hold no ill will toward the human race, in fact I think we have the potential (assuming we don't blow ourselves up) to be so much more than we are even now, but it pisses me off when certain ideological members of it take advantage of our cultural (and I mean worldwide cultural, both religious and real-politik) troika with death and act on it for their own selfish gain. I DON"T want the end of humankind and it pisses me off that these bastards are forcing me to contemplate it.
Nature, meh, doesn't bug me so much, not much I can do about that. I remember being about 6 and losing sleep because someday the sun would go supernova and burn this planet into a Post-Toastie. Early lesson in futility there...
I found a snippet by Harlan Ellison from his '74 introduction to 'Approaching Oblivion' which sums it up well for me vis a vis our situation:
As for the future, I'm brought in mind of a quote by Albert Camus:
"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."
And the present is being ripped-off and screwed-over by the omnipresent philosophy of I'm all right, Jack, which is a working-class Englishman's term for screw, you, baby, I've got mine. It's your future and you don't seem to give a royal damn what happens to it.
So the Ellison who writes this is a little more calloused an tougher than the one who went to Selma with King in March of 1965, less hopeful and prone to sweeping gardyloos. The Ellison sitting here now is an older version of the kid from Painseville who stopped trying to buck the tide of bigotry and stupidity and merely cut out to find the rest of the world.
Had I done this book back in 1970, as originally planned, you find in this space a clarion call to revolution, a resounding challenge to the future. But it's four years later, Nixon time, and I've seen you sitting on your asses mumbling about impeachment. I've gone through ten years waiting for you to recognize how evil the war in the Nam was. I've watched you loaf and lumber through college and business and middle-class complacency, pursuing the twin goals of "happiness" and "security".
What fools you are. Happy, secure corpses is what you'll be.
You're approching oblivion and you know it, and you won't do a thing to save yourselves. As for me and you in this literary liasion, well, I've paid my dues. Now I'm merely going to sit on the side and laugh my ass off at how you sink into the quagmire like a tricerotops...
...And if you hear me sobbing once in awhile, it's only because you killed me too, you fuckers.
I'm stuck on this spinning place with you, and I don't want to go, and you've killed me, and I resent it, and the best I can do is tell my little tomorrow stories and keep laughing as the wind whips the dirt in the playground at Lathrop grade school into an ominous dust-devil.
I've had thirty years of awareness in which to watch the approaching oblivion. Thirty years of watching those who have been invested with power do the most incredibly asinine things to hasten it. I really would love to see it pass by our doors, but I'm pretty sure that there is probably some motherf@#$%r out there flagging down the goddamn Angel O' Death (TM) because they have some fantasy to get what they always wanted out of it, even if it's just a few more of those soon-to-be worthless greenbacks. Shit, the poison is so ingrained in our culture that there are freaking pacifist New-Age hippies who have built concrete bunkers in the California Sierras for the occasion. The sheer numbers of those who unquestionably accept this scenario will do us in. I'm a little tired of fighting the current and trying to tell people that 'it doesn't have to be this way'... and mother Earth is making some pretty ominous noises of late...
I don't want to die. I don't want any of us to die. I give my all to my present- my family, friends and I've put my money where my mouth is and made a conscious choice to live a simple life years ago. But I don't have much say one way or t'other what happens in the future. All I can do is bitch about it. The internet is at least good for that.

May our future be brighter than our present.
As for End of the World movies, are they playing with a sturdy cultural meme, or are they reinforcing it?