Apocalypse Day - Apocalypse Now?
The world has changed, and at a rapid rate. It's always been quite horrible, at least the bits of it I've lived through, Reagan and Thatcher, Miners Strikes, Poll Tax riots, I survived an IRA bomb when I was 12, you get the picture. It never scared me though. For every right wing despot there was a lefty genius, for every bad law passed there was a law that helped someone, for every financial crash caused by greedy bastards I like to think the cold dead heart of a banker is reincarnated as a fluffy bunny... I digress, my point was that even living in the last few decades of the Cold War for every nuclear threat I saw democracy win something, the Berlin Wall came down for craps sake! Now though we seem to have a shift. The right of politics have shifted ever further towards the kind of ideology we saw in the 1930's, the left meanwhile it seems couldn't catch a cold in the Arctic they're that redundant at the moment, and those of us without radical thoughts on either side of the political spectrum are just hoping that no one wakes up North Korea or starts a serious fight with China. We in the United Kingdom may as well drop the United from our title as I've never seen such division in our people, we can definitely drop the Great from Britain. Our European friends are seeing the rise of extremism in their own politics, and America is a state of shit that even makes Richard Nixon look like a good guy. The world is definitely in trouble. World ending nuclear bomb type trouble? Even if you'd asked me in 1987 in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocity I lived through I'd have said no, even then I had belief, I saw that good in its many forms would win the day. Now? I'm absolutely fucking terrified. Not of terrorists, they will never win, but of our political landscape which seems to be edging towards annihilation of everybody who disagrees with our leaders. There is no future for our world, we may as well all prepare for the end. The weird guy in the street with the sandwich board that reads "The End is Nigh"? Well, we aren't laughing at him now are we.
With this all said I suppose I better try and cheer you all up. Here's a day celebrating everything apocalyptic in our pop culture. Enjoy! (and take notes, you might need them soon). No seriously, we are celebrating disaster today, remembering the days when we thought the weather, or something from space, or a rogue scientist like The Defective Inspector would seal our doom. The movies, books and shows that saw our world end in a fireball or covered in ice, not from a signature on a piece of paper by a power obsessed suit wearer. We as an audience have always found a weird kind of peace in watching the world quite literally burn when it's fictional, not so much when it's real, so forget about Mexican Walls and leaving a continent for a day and enjoy the glorious days when apocalypse was something we never imagined happening...
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