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I Was Raised To Believe The Apocalypse Was Upon Us. 2020 Is The Year I Stopped Believing
When I was a child I was taught that I would never die. In April of this year, testing my sense of smell with a bottle of bleach to my nose while alone in my Brooklyn apartment, the constant peal of ambulances echoing in the streets below, I wished I still believed.
I was raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses to think Armageddon was something to look forward to. God would destroy the wicked world as we know it, to be replaced with a theocracy in which people like my family could live in eternal peace. We didn’t believe in heaven, but that the dead would be resurrected on a perfected Earth free of sickness and death. If I was very good, and went door to door warning neighbours of their impending doom, I would survive even when the world I knew was wiped away.
Most of my peers avoided college because a degree would be useless in paradise. Some even put off marriage or children, waiting for a perfect world to make a perfect family.
This was a difficult year to stop believing in Armageddon. But in truth, I’d gradually outgrown a faith built on the same sort of blind adherence that helped the outgoing president build a devoted and dogmatic base. I had admitted it to myself, but not my family. And so while many New Yorkers were fleeing the city to shelter with their families out of state, I was dodging my parents’ phone calls.
To cheerfully anticipate the end of the world might have sounded ridiculous a year ago, but now every other tweet that populates my feed is a link to another preposterous news story accompanied by an only half-sarcastic wish for the end of days. And the headlines themselves are full of apocalyptic fervour: how to grocery shop for the apocalypse, what to wear for the apocalypse, how to job-search during the apocalypse.
I fell back on an old reflex to comfort myself — remembering a scripture about the Day of the Lord coming as a thief in the night, surprising us when we least expect it. Surely the end couldn’t arrive while Twitter was...
