Armageddon
God's Works Are What We Make of Them
It’s 2:00PM, Tuesday, April 7th, and I get a Signal message saying that American B52 bombers have departed an air base in the United Kingdom.
It’s 8:00 and I awake to the news that the President has promised to destroy an entire civilization. Its three hours later and I am watching the Secretary of War celebrate the rescue of a downed pilot on Easter Sunday with the words “God is good.”
One week prior, I am holding my friend as she grieves the loss of her closest companion. I fumble through her kitchen cabinet looking for tea bags. Something without caffeine. Don’t want to keep her up. She already has trouble sleeping. Her dog rests its chin on my thigh and looks straight into my eyes. It knows something is wrong with me. Someone calls and tells me God is good.
It’s four years earlier and I am standing on top of a mass grave outside the Church of St. Andrew in Bucha, Ukraine. A single shoe appears above the hastily plowed black earth mound. My new friend Chris points out that there is a dead dog in the corner of the churchyard. The Cyrillic writing on the church proclaims God is good.
It’s ten months later and Chris is killed by a Russian tank in Chasiv Yar while evacuating old people who don’t want to be evacuated. I go to his funeral in Kyiv. The priest reassures everyone that war is tragic, but that God is good.
One month later, I am in a village in Western Kurdistan. I place a heater in the hastily constructed tent on the ruins of her home. She thanks me, and then she thanks God, reminding me that earthquakes are terrible, but He is good.
It’s August, 2024, and I’m in Palestine asking a man about his son who was killed in an Israeli drone strike. A row of cinderblocks outlines the place where they found his son’s body. Dried blood stains the sidewalk where he had been sitting, next to a hollow crater where the munition landed. The man tells me he misses his son. He also tells me God is good. Two days later I meet my friend Lour at a restaurant in Ramallah.
It’s yesterday evening after dinner, Lour is in LA. She takes a long drag from a thin cigarette and explains how the world is going to end. Her elegant mouth twitches in a smile as she explains, wryly, that Palestinians have always known the world is going to end soon. Probably in 2033, maybe sooner.
She says that Westerners don’t understand this because Westerners don’t read Arabic, and all the best apocalyptic literature is written only in Arabic.
I suppose that to be a Palestinian means the world is always ending. Or at least always ending soon.
