Morbid fascination with apocalypse
Michelle Chance
Mayans, and zombies, and death, oh my! Movies, literature, video games, and even music are saturated with tales about the end of the world.
Whether it’s cannibalistic, un-dead humans destroying our own race, natural disasters brought on by foretold religious texts, or a Mayan calendar coming to an end; our culture is undoubtedly fascinated with the end of days.
Buy why? What brought on this sudden morbid attraction?
Y2K, terrorist attacks, anthrax, SARS, Swine Flu, H1N1, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, random public shooting sprees, bath salts in Florida…the list goes on and on.
Our generation has been raised on fear. As adolescents and young adults, we woke up each morning to a different threat level being presented on the television, bracing us for a probable terrorist attack.
So as adults, why wouldn’t we naturally gravitate toward disastrous tales of global destruction? It is because it has become expected.
We expect the pregnant woman in a crowded Middle Eastern town square to blow herself up. We expect global famine and starvation.
We have grown up with terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and guys like Osama Bin Laden plotting our demise in a distant cave.
Pop culture mirrors reality. Hollywood mimics real life occurrences to connect or control their audience. So, maybe the reason why we enjoy watching our hypothetical doom on the big screen, playing a character in a post-apocalyptic video game, or reading about starving children dying for food a la “The Hunger Games” can be blamed on our desensitized childhoods.
Um, no. I don’t think we should get off that easily.
Are we really that narcissistic as a society that every artistic medium we create is now focused on our deaths? In 1000 years when humans are still dominating the planet, how will they judge our society?
Will history imply that we were a little presumptuous to think that our deaths were so significant that we focused our entire culture around it?
The doomsday trend is dangerous to our society, not because it really might happen, but because it is making true zombies out of us. We are a society infected with thoughts of cataclysmic events that we cannot control. In the meantime we are neglecting the environment, abusing the earth, and forgetting what really matters: life. Pick your lifeless body up and stumble away from the Xbox, put your iPhone down, and create your own adventure.
Face it, you are going to die. Maybe not today, hopefully not tomorrow, but one day it will happen. We are all going to die. This is not something new. As a society we need to stop obsessing over death, violence, and war. We need to exhume our unconscious minds and start living. So whatever you do; do not become infected with the doomsday bug, because it is deadly.
