Foosball Voting Guru
Bizarro is brought to you today by Spooky Stuff.
It seems our old friend, Harold Camping, is back in the news. He was the kooky old geezer who convinced so many discerning Americans last spring that he had figured out some secret code in the Bible and that the world was going to end on May 21st. I might have believed it if it had come from Nicolas Cage since he has proven his ability to figure out secret codes, but I didn’t find Harold very compelling.
Anyway, Harold had a stroke in June and is now recovering, which begs the question that maybe his premonition that the world was ending was just about his own world ending when he died of a stroke. But he’s still alive so that can’t be it.
Anyway again, he’s now predicting that the world will “begin” ending “quietly” this Friday, October 21. (Harold seems to be fond of the number 21.) So keep an eye out for “quiet” evidence of the End of the World. Nicolas Cage could not be reached for comment.
Speaking of the end of the world, we in the U.S. are in the early conniptions of another presidential campaign season. I used to follow politics pretty closely (I even published a political satire in ’04) but it is so disappointing and frustrating that I have abandoned hope. I’ll keep voting, but that’s the most energy I can muster. The more I learn about history, the more I see that things never change. (Compare the policies of the Hoover administration which led to the Great Depression with the policies of Bush and Company.) I’ll admit that even though the Dems are not much better, the Republicans still favor ruining our economy by propping up the rich and screwing the rest of us, so I’ll vote Democratic. For all the good it will do.
And finally, what is the meaning of life? It is a question that has haunted each individual human for thousands of years. My personal journey started in the Catholic church when I was a kid. I then moved to fundamentalist Christianity as a teen, then to a nondescript belief in an undefined “higher power” in my early adulthood, which morphed into basic agnosticism. For me, peace came to me in my forties when I embraced the logic of atheism and accepted that there is no meaning to life. I wasn’t born for a “reason” any more than the moth that died on my porch last night was born for a reason. I happen to exist, same as the moth and every other random collection of molecules in the universe. Once seen from that perspective, the question becomes more pragmatic: how do I make the most of my life and enjoy the time I’m alive? I find that approach much more comforting than a system of invisible magic. For me, the world ends when I die. Could be later today, could be another 50 years. Once that happens, I’ll be as unaware as I was for all those billions of years before I was born. I’m cool with that.