Put Your Money Where Your Prophecy Is

44 minutes after the supposed end of the world, and I feel quite cheated.  Why do all the doomsday theorists get to take up valuable train advertising space, prime time news coverage, and undeserved space in the magazines and websites I read, without any expectations of accountability?  It's about time one of these movements is accompanied by legitimate stakes.  If judgment day is upon us, and you really want to let the world know, you could get attention by sparing yourself of all those worldy indulgences and giving them to me.  They won't matter pretty soon anyway right?  The end of the world doesn't seem like one of the harder things to convince people of if you really are sure of it yourself.  Instead of relying on the embarrassment of being wrong to dissuade people from attaching themselves to these wasteful causes, I'd like to see them challenged.  Sticking to their guns equates to just spouting rhetoric but a serious commitment that reflects the seriousness of their claim would be more appropriate.

Are the ads in the train that quote the bible and propose the end is near persuasive or informational?  I felt a bit ashamed of my city and the ad placement system in the subways when on my way home from Webster Hall at 4am I had to sit across from a propaganda-esque poster riddled with melodramatic biblical quotes and a referral to familyradio.com or some other similarly disturbing title.  Is this add trying to legitimize the claim that the world is over by showing me people were willing to spend money on designing and placing an ad?  That seems logically flawed since if it really was the end of the world, who cares about the money. 

Were they trying to convince me of the end so that I could tie up my loose ends with god on the ride home?  Considering I just came from a show by a group named Zed's Dead performing a genre of music where "filthy" is the head-honcho of compliments, there wasn't much salvation to be found on this hazy ride home.  Furthermore, my only company on the train was a 20 something year old passed out, who intermittently threw up on himself and forced me to change seats several times even though I was on the other end of the train because of the tributaries formed by what he had to drink that night and the capricious movements of the Q train.  I alerted the police to help out my faded fellow passenger when I got to my station. Maybe that's what the poster was encouraging, but I doubt it.

If those ad's worked, and got people to go to the links they showed, and increased revenue of those companies, SHAME ON THEM!  It isn't ethical to increase traffic in hope of future gains by claiming there won't be anymore traffic, hope, future, or gains.  It's a win-win for them and a lose-lose for me.  They get a completely unjustifiable amount of attention that benefits them in a long-run that they said wouldn't exist.  As Keynes said, "In the long-run we're all dead".  Apparently if you tell everyone their dead in the short run, you don't have to worry about the long run.