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This drawing was originally intended as commentary on people who are excited for the end of the world. The bible itself responds to them in Amos 5:18: “Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! To what end is it for you? The day of the Lord is darkness, and not light.”

My perspective was complicated recently by reading Prophet Song, Paul Lynch’s beautiful but terrifying novel about an authoritarian takeover of the Republic of Ireland. At the end of the book, one of the characters has this realization, “[ … T]he prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore [ … ].” Right now the end of the world is in Gaza, and every day it gets worse.