Signs of the Apocalypse

Gilbert S.C. Keith-Agaran

In bygone days, Sports Illustrated (a printed magazine covering sports nationally on a weekly basis) would have a blurb entitled Signs of the Apocalypse. The comments were usually brief and, for the most part, wryly and dryly funny.

Now most of what I know about the end of times I read as a kid in Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (Zondervan 1970) filled in over the years with Fundamentalist and Evangelical sermons on Daniel and Revelations passages, and later books on doomsday and Biblical prophecy. Now I read maybe one of Tim LaHaye & Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind series (the twelve-volume fictionalization of the rise and fall of the Antichrist and people who found faith after missing out on the Rapture) and saw parts of a Kirk Cameron film adaption. But I understood over the years the eschatological language used by that particular strain of American Christianity that generation after generation are convinced we are living in the end times (primarily pre-millennial) and that many of us will live to experience the literal Rapture and the Second Coming (Larry Norman’s I wish we’d all been ready was a familiar tune). My freshman year in college, I had friends driving to Fort Lauderdale drop me off in Lynchburg, Virginia so I could spend Spring Break with a Maui buddy attending Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Lynchburg Baptist College (later Liberty Baptist College and now Liberty University).

One of my favorite television shows was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It featured a horrific apocalypse-a-week dressed in high school angst with often dark humor and snappy dialogue. If I had the opportunity, I would have taken a college class on the series like I did with Homer, Shakespeare, Twain, American film classics and other cultural touchstones.

My love of fantasy goes back to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth—The Lord of the Rings / The Hobbit” and other works—C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Madeleine L’Engle’s time novels A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Those stories explored Christian and religious ideas like good versus evil, redemption and faith, backsliding and the return of a savior in the nick of time. I am a sucker for those types of stories.

The Apocalypse has been a theme in graphic novels I’ve enjoyed (I use that term rather than the pejorative “comic books” so I can be pretentiously serious)—Doomsday kills Superman, the villain Apocalypse dominates the X-men, Gog and Magog in the Kingdom Come world—and in fantasy post-disaster fiction like the S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse/Change novels (where Catholic mysticism and pagan spiritualism exists on equal ground).

Obviously all speculative fiction.
Tolkien and his contemporaries wrote allegorically after experiencing the horrors of World War I. Much of the imagery of the Wars in Middle Earth evokes the carnage and terror of that conflict. Their stories were warnings. Same with novels like George Orwell’s 1984, Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which are set in more familiar settings.
Perhaps more modern fantasy writers are less sure that good ultimately triumphs (or should win) over evil—perhaps colored by their American experiences from the Civil Rights movement, South America, Korea, Iran and VietNam and even the Iraq Wars and subsequent interventions, there is more ambiguity. Hollywood also often focuses on a distrust of government and other institutions. The internet and social media have further allowed people to do their own research without regard to the credibility of the sources. Just watch out for the powers that be—whether government, business or religious institutions—and blame them for your problems and challenges. And I admit that wariness and cynicism can apply across the ideological spectrum.

So I gotta wonder if perhaps we are living in the literal end times. Matthew 24 records Jesus advising his followers, “And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.” (Matthew 24: 6–8 KJV). News of the world today is so immediate and available that every day we can hear about some conflict breaking out or continuing or a natural disaster taking place somewhere in the globe. Israel has expanded its Gaza conflict to bombing Iran; Ukraine and Russian war continues; planes crash; famine and flooding and hurricanes still destroy places. And we can watch as it happens some outrage or obvious evil. It’s all very depressing (especially when friends and family and others in our community seem to not have the same reaction). The divisiveness is difficult to ignore.

I’m a somewhat dour personality generally. But I’ve always had a streak of idealism. It’s getting harder to remain optimistic that there will be progress.
It perhaps helps to know the United States has gone through these challenges before—we enshrined slavery in our founding documents, fought a bloody Civil War and then tolerated legalized segregation for a century afterwards, we interned resident Japanese aliens and Japanese of American Ancestry during World War II before apologizing and providing reparations many decades later, we excluded Chinese immigration in the Western U.S. despite wanting them to build our railroads, we allowed our top universities to limit the admission of Jewish students (and arguably Asian students in more recent decades). Perhaps there’s hope (and faith) there will be repentance and redemption to come (although I get the impression folks are pretty convinced their side is on the right side of history).

Gilbert S.C. Keith-Agaran’s practices law in Wailuku. He formerly served in the State and County government and formerly represented Central Maui in the Hawaii state legislature.

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