THE YEAR THE WORLD ENDED

Dear Humanity,

                   Believe me, the world is not about to end. The world ended long ago, long before folks began to talk about the end of the world.  Things fell apart long before things began to fall apart, long before this miserable virus took over the earth. The world first ended when ordinary men became wiser than spirit beings, when flesh and blood began to make rules and laws for their lives, when Thomas Paine of unblessed memory kicked away his beloved faith, when Friedrich Nietzsche  first put his god to death, when science replaced truth and philosophy took the place of reality. We were at ease; we laughed at the madness; we rejoiced at the birth of new and strange things, and gave cheap labels to things once revered and adored. We dug large graves for ourselves and our children and called it enlightenment.

                 The nations of the world have gone into hiding. A certain kind of chaos has taken over the globe. And all we hear is Virus, Virus, Virus, a certain evil pandemic from the east and west that has thrown the earth into rest and unrest. We fret as though this is new, as though this is the first virus on the face of the earth, as though this is the first woeful woe from the west. We forget the Hippies of the 1960s, when liberty made men mad, we forget the intellectual chaos of the 70s,   when isms replaced the search for knowledge. We forget so soon the joyful “conquest” of postmodernism over traditions, the triumph of the new school over the old school, the emergence of a new breed of women from the captivity of a masculine world. We forget, my people, we forget the destruction of order in the name of a new order.

               The world, dear friends, ended, when men stopped to pay attention to right and wrong, when one man’s food became another man’s poison, when innocent-looking folks fashioned multiple paths to the one true God, when strange angels descended in millions to lead wayward men and women into a certain strange New Age. I remember when the world ended, when things began to fall apart, when marriage lost its sacred color and sex lost its heavenly taste, when vulgar words spread from the lips of youths into the tongue of nobles, when fashion ceased to provide covering for the body, when reverence and rightness became an exclusive business of the oldies.

            Friends, the world ended long ago. Our social distancing, our lock down or shut down or whatever you call it has come rather too late, when the deed is already done. Should we not have gone into hiding and shut down our homes and factories when the first set of viruses first walked in, when the first messengers of Satan first bumped into our territories, when men began to love men, and women took women to the altar, when sane and sound folks began to mold themselves into something else? And now tell me: of what use is it defeating this present virus if we allow these other evil diseases—which no one calls evil, which no one sees as disease—to linger in our midst and devour our land?

           Think about these, till we meet at the other end of the tunnel.

Your beloved brother.

Udeme Ralph