By Kevin Foley
I’ve canceled my plans for this weekend. So has Robert Fitzpatrick. You should too.
According to Harold Camping of something called Family Radio, a Christian network out of California, the Rapture will arrive Saturday, May 21, 2011.
If you haven’t heard about Camping before last Tuesday, you’re not alone. At 89, Camping has lived a long and saintly life. His place in heaven is secure. You and I, on the other hand, need to prepare our souls for the coming End of Times, so if you planned on dining out somewhere nice Saturday evening, you might want to move those reservations to tonight to be on the safe side.
Fitzpatrick has taken Camping’s warning to heart. The 60-year-old retired MTA engineer spent his life savings - $140,000 – posting placards at New York bus stops warning harried commuters a “Global Earthquake: The Greatest Ever!” is headed their way on Saturday.
“When we know this truth about the time of the end, God’s people are obliged to get that out,” Fitzpatrick told the Toronto Star.
Truth-telling seer Camping claims we’re all about to be punished by God because America has embraced “gay pride” and same sex marriage. He’s also made calculations he says would crash Google’s computers to prove he’s right.
Actually, the arithmetic isn’t quite that complicated. Camping’s timing begins with the creation of the earth in 11,013 B.C., 13,002 years ago. Using various biblical prophesies, the octogenarian arrives at Judgment Day on May 21, when the Rapture begins for God’s “elected people.”
Gays and lesbians, I’m looking at you.
“God has given so much information in the Bible about this,” Camping declared in an interview with New York, “and so many proofs, and so many signs, that we know it is absolutely going to happen without any question at all.”
What is it with crackpots and the media? Years ago, a guy wearing a sandwich board reading “the end is near” was the gag in a New Yorker cartoon. Now, it seems any two-bit lunatic with a platform, however precarious, however obscure, is a bona fide news story worthy of our immediate and undivided attention.
This conga line of losers never ends, from the wild eyed birther Orly Taitz, to the racist Pamela Geller, to the Koran burning Terry Jones, screwballs keep coming out of the woodwork and supposedly sophisticated news decision makers keep putting them on the front page.
Donald Trump was never going to run for president. Every editor in America knew it. Yet they wasted thousands of hours of broadcast time, tanker loads of ink, and billions of innocent pixels covering that showboat’s self-serving “candidacy.”
At least with Trump, the media could pretend it had an obligation to keep us “informed.”
But Harold Camping? The last time I looked, Google had links to no fewer than 200 stories from major publications, network broadcasts and influential web sites around the world about this nobody’s nutty prognostication.
Maybe they’re just trying to make us laugh. And it would all be terribly amusing if young Americans weren’t dying every day in Afghanistan; if the Middle East wasn’t teetering on the brink of an abyss; if the deficit wasn’t threatening to break the economic back of the nation; if politicians weren’t in bed with Wall Street and special interest lobbyists; if terrorists weren’t trying to murder us; if the media took America’s problems as seriously as it takes Harold Camping.
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |