Every week, the news media, or some hyper-conservative political candidate, points to an event that they say is foreshadowing humanity’s imminent doom — whether it’s volatile economies, merciless natural disasters, widespread pandemics, or terrifyingly adorable gay teen kisses on “Glee” — to them, it’s all just proof that we’re headed for The End of Days.
But what would the world look like if we didn’t always think it was Armageddon? I bet you anything it would look something like this:
1. Having nothing urgent or overly dramatic left to report, all the cable news networks would have no choice but to air 24/7 coverage of unlikely, inspirational winners of overseas singing competitions, like orphan-turned-international-superstar Choi Sung-Bong of Korea’s Got Talent.
2. Instead of people saying: “Let’s just go for it, because, you never know, the world could end tomorrow,” people would say: “We really shouldn’t do that because we’ll probably look stupid tomorrow when that sex tape leaks out to the press.”
3. Congress would actually get stuff done because they’d realize there’d be future generations that would immortalize their current mistakes by using their political party names as verbs in everyday conversation, like: “You tried to save me from personal bankruptcy by holding me hostage and holding a gun to my head? You totally teapartied me! LOL.”
4. The Pope would declare that being gay is not a sin. Then he would allow priests to marry gay couples in the church. Finally, he would declare sex before marriage, prostitution, and abortion before the end of the first trimester as perfectly acceptable. A day after all these new rules would be implemented, and the world was still at peace, the Pope would point to the sky and say: “A-ha! Called your bluff.”
5. People would look at an approaching hurricane and say: “Oh yeah, I’ve seen one of those before. They affect only certain locations, if you stay out of the way, they don’t kill you, and, after a couple days, they disappear into thin air, leaving you ample time to recover your belongings and move to a non-tropical location (like California) where they can never affect you ever again. Like ever. No joke.”
6. People would smile and skip everywhere they went, instead of shifting their eyes and walking hesitantly.
7. Instead of investing in “end-of-the-world” bunkers, people would invest their money in education, infrastructure, and after-school arts programs for kids. Moreover, the absence of underground bunkers would make it super hard for overthrown dictators to flee in the case of an uprising — forcing these dictators to make their escape by hiding behind cardboard cut-outs of rose bushes.
8. Due to the lack of fear of the end of the world, there would be a dramatic decrease of “stress eating.” This would cause the obesity epidemic in the country to vanish and be replaced with the “I’ll-save-the-rest-of-this-for-later” epidemic — giving people the new, burdensome task of having to wade through thousands of leftovers in their refrigerators in order to get to fresh food.
