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The Final Days
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: November 8th, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/magazine/01world-t.html
Coast to Coast AM is an overnight radio show devoted to what its weekday host, George Noory, calls the unusual mysteries of the world and the universe. Coast to Coast AM is by far the highest-rated radio program in the country once the lights go out. My motto tonight, Noory intoned at the beginning of [a] program, is be prepared, not scared. What followed was a graphic recitation of disaster scenarios for 2012, including hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions caused by solar storms, ... and mass extinctions brought on by nuclear winter. For Christians awaiting rapture or Shiites counting the days until the Twelfth Imam appears, the trials and injustices of the known world are a prelude for the paradise that we can imagine but cant yet achieve. Judging by the sheer number of predicted end dates that have come and gone without the trumpets blowing and angels rushing in, we are a people impatient to see our world redeemed through catastrophe. Gnostics predicted the imminent arrival of Gods kingdom as early as the first century; Christians in Europe [were prepared] for the end of the world at the first millennium; the Shakers believed the world would end in 1792. The Jehovahs Witnesses have been especially prodigious with prophetic end dates: 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994. End dates are not the stuff of fantasy, after all; each and every one of us has a terminal appointment inscribed in our calendars. Perhaps that is why we need to imagine a supernatural force with one eye on a ticking clock, waiting to make everything new again.
Note: Could the desire for apocalypse represent a deep dissatisfaction with both ourselves and the world around us? Don't be surprised if after 2012 a new date of apocalypse eventually comes in vogue again. Could it be that when we open to accepting things as they are, we begin to experience more of paradise in our lives here and now? Coast to Coast tends to focus on the sensational, yet it is one of the few programs reporting deep cover-ups that no other media will touch.
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