A Holiday Gift From Me to You

Since this season has religious overtones, I decided that you might enjoy a bit of fiction that was uplifting, if I may make a play on words.

Happy Holidays!

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Ex Post Rapture or The Rupture(?)

I got up this morning expecting a day much like the others but when I sat at my computer with a cup of coffee to read the news, an explosion of a type occurred. Then I finally got to see some of the videos.

Damn, they were right!

People were rising up through the air! Huge numbers of them! I wondered how the air traffic control systems would handle that but I guess this is one of those “let God’s will be done,” kind of things. There were some rather poignant scenes where most of the members of a family, assembled outside their home to observe the phenomenon, began to rise … but not all. I guess there were some closet atheists in those families. The other family members seemed to express shock and dismay that their entire family wasn’t rising.

This whole thing took place over about a twenty minute period and if it weren’t for smartphones, we might not have a record of its occurrence. Many of the traditional news media outlets were struggling to be able to report, because their staffs were so reduced.

Huh, the Christians were right! Damn! I did not see Jesus in the clouds beckoning his followers to join him, but still that seemed a more likely explanation than, say, a selective failure of gravity to keep those people on the ground or some alien transporter-like machine being employed.

My thoughts then turned to the other events that were promised by the fans of the Rapture, you know the Apocalypse, fiery pits, demons, flying horses, and so on, so I continued to watch scenes of events on the Internet, thinking I was probably getting a more accurate and wider picture than I would get from the balcony of my apartment. After about a hour and a half, all I was getting was looped footage of the rising Christians, at least I assumed they were Christians, and nothing newer, so I guessed the show was over.

What the real consequences of this were to be I hardly guessed but they were real and substantial.

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Overnight, well actually, in less than an hour on that morning, the population of the U.S. declined by about 40% or so. Accurate estimates are hard to come by. The Bible Belt was hit hard and it seems like over 60% of those folks, maybe even as much as 70%, uh, rose.

All of the people who expected us atheists would just go berserk, ravening if you will, were now gone, so the relative calm of the population that was left behind was a confirmation that their criticism of us was unfounded. (As if we didn’t know that.) But I do admit to some anxiety as to whether the lawless part of our society would feel a special license to go about their business with renewed vigor, but that also didn’t seem to happen. Whether it was the demonstrated proof of the existence of some supernatural power that put “the fear of god” into them or whether they were just stunned like the rest of us, I can’t say.

What I can say, is that shortages of anything that seemed in little supply disappeared overnight. Many of the homeless claimed squatters rights in one of the many abandoned homes and, as time told, kept them up pretty well. Nobody begrudged them this because there were so many abandoned homes, it seemed hurtful to tell them to stay outside. There was so much food on the shelves that could spoil, that it was distributed freely so that it would not go to waste. The public utilities, even though short-staffed, seemed to soldier on pretty well.

After the initial shock, there was an adjustment period. So many jobs that were really necessary needed to be filled that people left relatively unimportant jobs to fill them, leaving open a great many jobs for people who were either un- or under-employed. (Finally, we got something trickled down … sorry, old memes are hard to give up.) Since almost no corporate executives were Raptured (that’s what people called it), they lost a lot of their arrogance and no longer claimed their title as a “Master of the Universe.” And after they adjusted to a world of lesser demand, they hired freely out of public spirit, thinking as Henry Ford did, that if they paid well enough, they’d have more customers for their products.

Thousands and thousands of abandoned church properties were claimed via “eminent domain” by the government and turned into secular hospitals, community centers, housing for the poor, that sort of thing. In the legal proceedings some former members of the churches fought those orders but they were denied because they weren’t real Christians; if they had been, well, you know.

Environmentalists, those who were left anyway, were ecstatic as the pressure put on our environment decreased dramatically. The climate change deniers were mostly gone and, in any case, demand for fossil fuels fell way off and coal mines and oil wells were sealed off, to be opened in the future if needed. Many people say they saw the light and would be looking into renewable energy sources. Apparently we would have more time to address our real problems and people seemed to realize, all of a sudden, that this world is all that we have and we had best take care of it. I guess none of us were expecting a better life after we died any more.

People also seemed to lose steam on going to war. Why create hell on Earth if we had the capacity to meet everyone’s basic needs. It just didn’t seem right any more. Slowly, and it was slowly because distrust fades slowly, our militaries shrank through attrition. Recruiters were having a hard time recruiting folks as opportunities abounded elsewhere.

Funny thing is, when we were all thrown together, in the same boat as it were, people started looking at their neighbors and co-workers as just other people, like them. They started caring less about what color their skin was, or what country they were raised in, and more about what their character was. It certainly didn’t matter what religious faith they had, you know, before. I guess that was part of the miracle.

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All in all, this Rapture thing turned out to be a good deal for those of us who didn’t fly away. I do hope those Christians are happy, wherever they are now. Some people are saying things like “the whole world got better when the riff raff were swept away,” and other things like that, but I think that is just being unkind, due maybe to a leftover bitterness from … before. We really don’t know what happened to all of those people. For me, I just hope they are okay. And, I would like to thank them for the better world they left behind. I suspect that is what Jesus actually wanted.