Are things so bad today that they could point to this being the "end of times"? Not at all. I've heard opinion show hosts, religious types, prophet believers and many other types say, "Things are really bad today, just look at the news." They then rattle off several stories involving violent crime, corporate crime, unemployment, a suicide attempt, disease outbreak, natural disaster and the price of gas in order to justify this statement and say that this must be a sign of the end times. The problem? These are all isolated incidents; there is no common cause that if one thing was avoided then none of this would happen. If this was a worse time for crime then we should be experiencing the highest crime rates in our existence, yet we're not.The only thing that has increased is the amount of news coverage we have. Wall-to-wall news networks covering every possible story and analyzing them, connecting them, artificially, to other stories, assuming facts and speculating the cause.
It's easy to look at a week's worth of news, find all of the tragic stories, count them up and come to the conclusion that things are much worse now than they ever have been then quote the Bible, Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, Mother Jones, Agnes Nutter, Harold Camping, Pat Robertson, Glenn Beck or somebody's crazy Uncle Joe as proof that the end of times are really upon us. We are not in the end times, those won't be around for a few billion more years. The only phenomenon that is truly happening is that we have more news coverage than ever before. For the first time in our history, Anderson Cooper can be in Iraq, Afghanistan and Wisconsin at the same time, reporting on any number of stories and then bring in the analysts to tell us what these stories mean.
There is nothing supernatural going on at all. Disasters happen and are happening at the same rate and intensity that they've always happened. The only difference now is that somebody with perfect hair is telling you how bad it is. Diseases are at an all-time low and life expectancy is at an all-time high and growing, but we'd never know that by watching the news. I have, for the most part, quit watching the news. I get the news from multiple online sources, starting with traditional news outlets and then moving to specialized sites depending on the story. The mainstream news media is ad supported and ratings-based which means that they have to attract viewers by including their own twists or spin to stories or having special editorial remarks. This no longer good journalism, but tabloid news.
Don't read the newspaper or watch the news and think that every story is somehow connected because it's not. The producers of news shows use the phrase, "In related news..." to give people the impression that two individual stories are somehow connected to one another when there is no connection to be had. Some people could easily connect the dots and say that things are horrible today and that it must be a sign of the end of times. The end is not near and all anyone has to do is look around and think about it. We have a longer life expectancy, more diseases are being eradicated and there is better technology to protect people during natural disasters. Things are much better than they were even fifty years ago and they're only getting better.