My Own Private Armeggedon

In some ways, this is a reprint. I wrote about this subject in another blog, but I thought it needed revisiting. Our interpretation of the Bible might be a bit off. I'll give you an example of how that could happen. When I was a kid, they used to have this comic strip that featured two nude children (kind of sick when you think of it) with a caption over their heads that read, Love Is... and at the bottom there was some, what I considered, silly saying. Once I read one that read, Love Is....never having to say you're sorry. As a 11 year old, I interpreted it to mean that you could do anything you wanted to someone that you love and never have to say you're sorry. Now mind you, I'm a relatively intelligent individual, but I somehow f**cked that one up. I walked around for the better part of the day thinking how great this LOVE thing is, until I mentioned it to my relatively intelligent older sister, and she called me an idiot and put things into their proper persepective.

Now I just admitted to you how ridiculously naiive I was about the meaning of that saying-imagine how many people misinterpret things that are written, stated, displayed or reenacted but don't say anything, because in their minds, they've fully comprehended what the intended message was. Take that concept and apply it to the Bible, and armeggedon.

We are under the impression that the entire world, at one time, will be engulfed in this chaos. But what if armeggedon was going on right under our nose, and just because it hasn't arrived on our doorsteps yet, we are completely unaware? Is that a possibility?

Take into consideration that tragedy that occurred in Rwanda some years ago. Think about the horror that those people went through. Isn't that an example of what is mentioned about armeggedon? Think about it. How is that not the ultimate in tragedy and horror for the people who suffered through it? What about the Cambodians in the days of Pol Pot? Millions of people were exterminated. Isn't that their own private armeggedon?

I could go on for days recounting human tragedy after human tragedy. East Timor, Somalia, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki-perhaps we've been living through armeggedon all along. Maybe it's happening now, but the only reason we are allowing it to continue is because our impression of it is something entirely different. We think it will be a global occurrence. Perhaps we're wrong. Perhaps armeggedon will occur one region at a time. Maybe evil lacks the ability to do it's thing all at once so it acts like a swarm of locust, descending upon an area, wreaking havoc, and moving on to the next region. All the while, we sit complacently because surely this isn't how we envisioned it would happen. How many times have we had an idea about how something would occur and when it finally took place we said, "Oh I thought that it would be entirely different."? Often times our visions don't align with reality.

I don't know for certain that we are living in the end days or not, but what I do know is this-we can't destroy this world. We are fooling ourselves if we believe that. What we can do is make it uninhabitable for most of the life forms that are here, but this planet will continue to be here whether we're on it or not. Most of us refuse to be even slightly inconvenienced to make a stand and do something about what's taking place. By the time we decide to do something, the tradedy will be upon us and by then it will be too late.

Make no mistake about it, one day the tragedies that have visited the rest of the world will find their way here. And we will experience the death and destruction that has so plagued the rest of the world. Was it ever avoidable? Was it the inevitable? Yes and no. Yes it's avoidable, and no it isn't the inevitable. But things, I believe have gone too far, and while we watch casually as the rest of the world struggles with horror after horror, we can take comfort in the fact that when genocide comes knocking on our door, we saw it coming yet chose to do nothing and we can blame no one but ourselves.

Prince