Nearly 80 years ago, a munition which killed hundreds of thousands of people in one go and levelled two cities was deployed twice, and only twice.
The shadow of those mushroom clouds stretched across the ensuing five decades. Schoolchildren cowered helplessly under their desks during useless shelter drills. Military standoffs escalated, then de-escalated into standard proxy wars. Countries with might, money, and brains hoarded (and continue to hoard) these weapons. Then, over a very short period of time in the ’80s and early ’90s, one of those countries ran out of money. Victory was declared, with credulous academics even proclaiming the ‘end of history’ (how did that age, Fukuyama?). All was well in the West.
Over 100 years ago, toxic clouds of mustard gas felled entire villages-worth of young men, fighting and dying together in ‘friendship brigades’. Whoever was left got mopped up with machine guns or horrific trench diseases, and whatever wretches were left got sent home with shell shock. Society got pretty wild after that war, because people hadn’t been that close to death at that scale since probably the Black Death.
(About 700 years ago, entire towns were claimed by the Black Death.)
About 150 years ago, after two groups of Americans decided to kill each other and efforts to rebuild society along a fairer paradigm were abandoned, new technology enabled a small cadre of already-rich men to hoard unimaginable wealth on the backs of disenfranchised immigrants and impoverished child labourers.
400 years ago, slavers from one continent forcibly and violently uprooted entire tribes of people in another continent to be raped, murdered, and worked to death in a third continent. (Let’s keep it short and not get into what Columbus did to the Caribs 150 years before that.)
Throw a dart at the course of history, and you’ll land on upheavals such as these. The world is always ending. A new world is always beginning. Where you are in the emerging order is predicated on how tightly you cling to the old world. Perhaps this post should have been titled ‘It’s always an apocalypse’. Because it is.
What does the word ‘apocalypse’ lend to this moment in history? What does it ever lend to any point in history, except to aggravate the limbic system?
I’m reminded of the phenomenon of semantic satiation. Repeat any word over and over again, and it loses its meaning. This then allows those with a vested interest to re-form the word with any definition they care to supply. Try it. Apocalypse. Genocide. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
My advice is worth nothing, because it’s free. I’m just some disembodied person on the internet who writes books nobody reads. But here you go:
Just live, as best you can. The apocalypse is here, and has always been here – it’s the sea in which we swim. Learn to ride its currents, and know that sea creatures expect death and never sleep.
Just live your life.
Sonya Blanck writings 