WE'RE IN HELL

Anybody remember the Millennium?  I don’t mean the turn—several years back—of the year/century/millennium, but the bright promise our world seemed to hold in those lost, halcyon days at the end of the 20th Century.  Remember the Peace Dividend?  The many improvements that would be wrought with the billions of dollars we’d be saving now that the Cold War had ended? 

Remember the fall of Apartheid in South Africa and how optimistic we were when we learned that the world finally produced enough food to feed everyone (enough indeed, to make us all very fat)?  All it took, we thought, was some tweaking of the system and hunger would be rendered a thing of the past.  

Now I grant you, some of these were hopelessly naïve, but many of us looked to the coming millennium with a sense of great optimism.  True, there were people who held the opposite view.  Chief among them were two factions: the Techno-Apocalyptics—who believed that a glitch in the programming of most computers (the dreaded Y2k Bug) would send us back to a technological stone age—and the Religious Apocalyptics, who believed that the world would literally end and evil people would be cast into Perdition—but only after the righteous were spirited away to Heaven in a Divine Rapture. 

These were, however, a minority.  As I said, most of us were optimistic in those days, albeit perhaps naïvely.

So what happened when the new millennium arrived?  I don’t need to tell you.  Two stolen presidential elections, terrorist attacks, two wars, the economy in a nosedive, the gap between rich and poor widening, the mortgage crisis, record high gas prices, skyrocketing food costs threatening millions with starvation, a spying apparatus that has compiled a dossier on literally everyone, environmental rape (e.g. mountaintop removal, clear-cut logging, fracking; etc.), genocide in Africa, and on and on and on. 

Lordy! 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if many of these disasters didn’t exist, if only in nascent form, in the last millennium.  But I’m by no means the first to opine that things took a decidedly darker turn after the year 2000.  

So what caused all of this?  Well, after several years of Deep Thinking and Ponderous Reflection, your intrepid reporter has found an answer to this depressing riddle.

Movies like The Sixth Sense, and TV shows like The Hitch-Hiker (that famous Inger Stevens episode of The Twilight Zone), reflect a common theme in the folklore of many peoples ‘round the world.  To wit: those who are dead but don’t know it.  Now, the characters in these two stories eventually realized they’d died, but there are many more tales to be found in ghost lore where the people never learn of their demise.  These poor, lost souls go on haunting the same places they frequented in life—presumably for eternity.

…And that, in a nutshell, is my theory.  The friggin’ preachers and religious wackos were right!  At the turn of the millennium, we all died and went to Hell.  Just like the people in those stories, some catastrophe or act of God snuffed us one and all, only we don’t know it. 

And we’ve been drop-kicked into the fiery pit as punishment for our personal sins and our acquiescence to the Evil Deeds of our leaders.  Beelzebub knows that our punishment will be most keenly felt if we don’t realize we’re in Hell, if we think we’re just having a temporary run of bad luck.  If we knew we were damned, our hopes couldn’t be dashed again and again because we wouldn’t have any.

And what better example of this dashed hope can we find than with the Obama administration?  Old Sparky got our hopes up by offering us a bright, articulate man with the look and manner of wisdom and integrity.  He promised to roll back the abuses of his predecessor and restore our nation to a Path of Righteousness.  And as our first African-American president, he gave us hope that we had come one step closer to our dream of equality and opportunity for all. 

Our reward?  More of the same.  Much more of it.  He didn’t quench the hellfire that torments us, he stoked it (presumably via an unmanned drone strike).  In spite of his many promises, he didn't renounce the abuses of the past, but embraced and enlarged them.  Hey, they don’t call Satan the Great Deceiver for nothing!  Who else could've found a more exquisite torment for liberals and conservatives alike? 

“But what of the Rapture?” some will ask.  “If all those apocalyptic ravings were really true, why didn’t the righteous disappear?  God’s spokespeople told us the Chosen Ones were to be lofted into the clouds in the moments before the Final Call, didn’t they?”

Well, I have an answer for that too.  When God took a look at all the religious blowhards, moral crusaders and hypocrites of their ilk, He realized that they were the least righteous of us all.  He contrasted the splendor in which they lived and the luxurious appointments of their churches against the suffering and poverty of millions of their parishioners and He knew who was there true master, their most cherished idol.  (And He got damned tired of people thinking He couldn’t handle His money, always in need of donations.  It was becoming embarrassing, I tell you.)

In short, everyone went to Hell because THERE ARE NO RIGHTEOUS PEOPLE! 

Now I admit, at first look this theory might seem farfetched, but if you think about it, all the pieces fall into place.  For example, I used to chuckle a few years ago when someone referred to Dick Cheney as the Dark Prince.  But everything becomes perfectly clear when you realize that HE REALLY IS THE DARK PRINCE!  I mean, who but the Living Embodiment of Insensate Evil would’ve carried on like he did?

Similarly, the actions of our vaunted representatives and bureaucrats in government make no sense when examined under the assumption that they are rational, moral human beings.  But their shenanigans become perfectly logical when you understand that they’re really the imps and demons of the Inferno, charged with the responsibility of making our lives—quite literally—a living Hell. 

So stop bitching about the state of the world.  It’s already ended and we’re all damned for eternity.  Now get on with your suffering, you wicked, sinful people!