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That the rapture was imminent.
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That being black means you have to try twice as hard to get half as far.
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That "success" comes from hard work.
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That heaven is a real place.
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That we live in the best of all possible worlds.
Responses, in order:
We made it past the ones I heard about in 1988, 1992, 1996, 1997, 1999, 1 January 2000, and the infamous 21 Decmber 2012. It seems that predicting "the end of the world" isn't best left to zealots. However, climate modelling seems to be fairly accurate so far...
Being black (myself) has resulted in my trying twice as hard. I haven't yet made it half as far. Racism, in point of fact, sets EVERYONE back. Dismantling racism, and every other bigotry besides, gets us to the starting line.
Success — under a sustainable, humanistic, virtue-seeking, equitable rubric — eludes everyone who believes in its attainment within an explotative, supremacist, advantage-imbalanced, wealth-dominated system. There is no point at all in seeking success when drowning is the result of failure. Survival is sufficient for most. Some degree of comfort is luxury. Success, neutral buoyancy or flight beyond the trappings of this capitalist ocean, is a gate-kept and forcibly protected status. As it always has been. Desire for an echelon beyond survival, a measure of "success", depends on building connections to the gate-keepers or building new gates to keep; not "hard work."
Well, hell is real. We keep making it more real and with newer manifestations. Witness Gaza. Every warscape from Ukraine to Iran to South Sudan to Yemen. Every austerity measure. Every policy that disproportionately protects wealth and punctuates poverty. Heaven, on the other hand, is a vanishingly narrow set of possibilities. Basking in the glory of this world, and the universe writ large, could be real. But, again, hellscapes are more profitable.
Time travel, whether by quantum tunnelling or in a phone booth or DeLorean with a flux-capacitor, might permit us to test out possible worlds. Without time travel, or some multiversal panopticon, we are stuck with a singular perspective. We can only try to predict what will work and we can only reason from past patterns. This world, we cannot deny, serves few and harms many. Its progress is, by no means, absolute. Yet, general human behaviour progresses as though and other system yields an increase in chaos and suffering. It is difficult to see how. Modest, incremental change is capable of vast improvements in living conditions. Many corners of the planet choose care in place of villainy during an emergency. Protect the weak, organize resources, exercise patience, build back better. It is time we realize this is the start of a long emergency. Longer, by far, than Covid-19.