Armageddon's midwives

Much of the Right has an obsession with the end of the "world". They call it the rapture or the End Times. Conservative Kevin Phillips has now written a book that details the animating power the apocalypse has for the Right. The Left has versions of end times obsession - it is called Peak Oil or Global Warming. Checking oil prices and the state of the Greenland ice sheet daily on Google news is the progressives' equivalent to a rightwinger reading all world events, however minor, as something directly out of the book of Revelation. The difference is, of course, that in the case of Peak oil the evidence has become powerful, and the case for Global Warming is now overwhelming. The progressive case for impending crisis relies, to a large extent, on a growing body of fact. The Revelation of John is an article of faith used by certain factions to codify a sense of doom.

The danger inherent in apocalyptic policy animated by belligerent faith and not facts are clear for the United States. The fracturing of civil society, religious intolerance, and finally the creation of a defacto theocracy in the place of Jeffersonian democracy. The real and final danger is this truth: The end of the world is not near. The End Game for the right wing endtimers is an article of faith, not fact. Much must be destroyed or the belief system is worthless. Those that have been "saved" will be whisked away, and the rest of us will be torn to shreds by the Four Horseman here on earth. To the Right wing endtimers the near future is both catastrophic and inevitable. This learned helplessness has been energized and monotized. It has infected a growing body of powerful interest groups who overtly desire an American theocracy. By extension this belief has infected the Republican Party. Once the party of fiscal responsibility, it is now the party of crushing debt. This wild disregard for any semblance of fiscal sanity is not a belief in the power of the future. It is a blatant disregard for it. The Real Politic of the GOP past has been thrown overboard for "preemptive war" and a contempt for world opinion. Endless war depends on hopeless populations.

We must not allow the most powerful to midwife armageddon.

The end of the world is not near. What is near, based on facts and an extensive body of evidence, is the end of a country and a world we recognize. Climate change is here. Nine trillion dollars in U.S. government debt is here. The dangers to a society completely ( and look around, I do mean completely) dependent of foreign oil are overwhelming - and here.

The fantasies of the Christian Right will not bring on the end of the world. Life will go on. Callous disregard for that future life is not a part of any reasonable religion. It is criminal neglect.