6
" At the risk of stating the obvious: nobody is going to make America great again. Nobody even seriously imagines it to be a possibility. America might, it is true, eventually stop outsourcing its manufacturing to China, but if those jobs are ever brought back home, they will return in the form of automated labor. Robots and algorithms will not make America great again—unless by “America” you mean billionaires, and by “great” you mean even richer. Its middle class has been gutted, sold off for scrap. Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood—a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go "
― Mark O'Connell , Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
8
" I came across one company called NuManna, named in reference to manna, the foodstuff the god of the Old Testament had provided for the Israelites during the time of their wandering after the Exodus. The company marketed gigantic buckets of freeze-dried powdered foodstuffs with a shelf life of a quarter of a century, whose varieties included, but were by no means limited to, oatmeal, hearty beans and beef, cheddar broccoli soup, and pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks. In the Testimonials section of NuManna’s website, I read a brief blurb from a customer named Reagan B., which seemed to me an unwitting encapsulation of the absurdity of the entire apocalypse preparedness project. “This stuff is awesome,” wrote Reagan. “My wife has been away for a while so I ate NuManna while she was gone. It was simple and everything I had was really good. I wish NuManna was around when I bought a bunch of bulk food in the past from the Mormons. I don’t want to have all these ingredients and put them together. NuManna was simple and great tasting. I gave away all my other bulk food.” At first this comment seemed purely and unimprovably comic in its conjuring of a character who, for all his determination to be adequately prepared for the collapse of civilization due to nuclear war or the impact of a massive asteroid, was also the type of man for whom not having his wife around to cook dinner—which seemed to me to be at worst a Domino’s Pizza situation—forced him to crack open his apocalyptic food stash. (Equally bewildering, equally wonderful, was his purchasing food in bulk only to conclude that he lacked the stomach for the labor of assembling all these ingredients into meals.) "
― Mark O'Connell , Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
14
" The future is a source of fear not because we know what will happen, and that it will be terrible, but because we know so little, and have so little control. The apocalyptic sensibility, the apocalyptic style, is seductive because it offers a way out of this situation: it vaults us over the epistemological chasm of the future, clear into a final destination, the end of all things. Out of the murk of time emerges the clear shape of a vision, a revelation, and you can see at last where the whole mess is headed. All of it--history, politics, struggle, life--is near to an end, and the relief is palpable. "
― Mark O'Connell , Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
