¡Apocalypse Ahora! A Queer Chicano’s Guide for White People on the Secrets to Surviving the End of their World

The world is ending, apparently.

More specifically, the Great White version of the world is ending, thanks to a combination of Global Warming, unfettered capitalism, and reality show-vetted fascism.

These anxieties — over rising shorelines, rising rents, and rising brown demographics — are leading white civilization to face a classic dilemma: that when you run out of world to overrun, the only thing left to do is to cannibalize your own.

It’s the same quandary homicidal maniacs experience after they massacre everyone in the room. They haven’t much choice but to point the gun at their own temples and die amongst the dead. Or amongst those playing dead.

Over the centuries, there have been some resilient brown and queer people — folks who’ve managed to survive by playing dead, running away, escaping, assimilating, slipping and slivering through the cracks of genocide, slavery, multiple colonizations, and the other implements of white supremacy.

Here are some tips to help reduce the fear trumping reason this political season. The fear shared to varying degrees by End of the World preppers, Oregon wildlife refuge occupiers, and Republican primary voters — people who haven’t realized that stockpiles of freezed dried food, Mylar blankets, and an arsenal of guns won’t protect their whiteness from obliteration.

1. Learn another language as soon as you can (maybe even two)!

Like, yesterday.

Log on to that neglected Duolingo account and get to translating.

Might I suggest selecting a Chinese dialect, Spanish, or Arabic? Because how else are you going to speak to your brownish grandchildren once the Muslim Chinese hordes use South America as a conduit into the USA?

Identity is so intimately intertwined with language that language will be target numero uno (that means ‘number one’) for conquerors, alien or otherwise. Colonizers and invading forces will not only take your land, trees, gold, oil, water, squaws, feather collections, whatever, but they will also gun for your language, too.

They’ll keep the useful words that name things they don’t have, corrupt others words, and discard the rest. Next, your children will get smacked for speaking English when they really need to be to answering in the new dialect of Spanish-ese (a dialect, as of right now, only spoken by doughnut shop owners in barrios across the U.S).

I mean, you can already feel the anxiety over the impermanence of English, not only in backlashes to bilingualism in schools and government, but in literature, too.

As novelist Junot Diaz has observed, “Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.”

Often, the most valuable survivors of End of the World scenarios are the polyglots who prove useful (and conniving) because they can translate between the conquered and conquering. They are usually the first to know what is about to go down.

¡Pues, apúrense. Apréndanse otro idioma!

(One of the persons who edited this commented, “I would translate this…otherwise I am just going to skip over it”).

Talk about passive aggressive white supremacy. You have been forewarned.

2. Hide your gods behind the new ones.

Even if you are an atheist and have already replaced traditional Judeo-Christian devotional entities with money or your career or Instagramming your food, you might consider the practice of hiding your beliefs.

For those who still pray: I know, there is a special attachment to seeing your god in your image, especially after centuries of sandy blond, ol’ blue-eyed Christ working his way into mosaics, murals, and the collective unconscious.

But just as a way to prepare yourself for change, you can start, maybe, like, putting a statue of Jesus Christ behind some Arabic art or some innocuous souvenir you bought on that trip to Puerto Vallarta. Maybe in your annual nativity scene you could paint baby Jesus Krishna-blue and add extra doll arms to Mary like she’s some Hindu goddess.

In fact, you might get so creative at hiding your gods that you’ll forget who you were praying to originally. Chicanos realize on some level that their Virgen de Guadalupe is really a Tonantzin, an Aztec mother goddess in fierce Catholic drag. Consider all those African-originated Vodou gods still costumed as Catholic saints centuries after the slave trade.

Hiding your gods, though, is just the physical manifestation of the overarching concept. This isn’t just about religion.

Whatever you value — your family, your money, your culture — you must learn how to hide it. Suppress your identity. Don’t let the new rulers see you pray, emote, or even love something. They will take what you love and obliterate it. Practice cultural stoicism. Submerse your emotions. Then squirrel away all your valuables into holes and caves so that your great-great-great-great grandchildren (or future archeologists) can rediscover what was threatened with obliteration but escaped by being buried.

3. Have lots of sex

Fuck like crazy.

I know some aspects of this survival strategy already occur in such disciplined sects as the Mormons and the Hasids who breed for days in assurance of future generations.

But the motive here is not merely procreative. I’m speaking to the gays and childless straights also. It’s alright to be happy, even at the End of the World. And sex is one way to experience our joyful humanity.

Writer Arundahti Roy says that one of the best ways to fight against empire is to experience joy,

“I also look at happiness as a weapon. If they take that away from me, they’ve won. So it’s very important to search for joy in the saddest places — it’s very, very important. Happiness isn’t something that somebody comes and gives you. It doesn’t come from buying a washing machine. The notion of happiness that is sold to us is so false. For me, there will never be a world where I can’t find something to smile about — just the quality of the light on a river. Fascism can’t take that away.”

It is the only weapon we have, sometimes.

Because when you’re outgunned, when larger entities have heat-seeking thingamabobs and drones and badass helicopters, you’re not going to win the arms race. The only ultimate weapon you have is wielding your happiness. That’s how the ancestors survived. All the peoples that have been enslaved and jailed and removed and defeated and conquered have secreted joy.

Deep, deep, deep far away from the conquerors’ eyes and ears we have smiled and danced and sang and orgasm-ed unseen, unrecorded.

As our worlds ended, we lost our civilizations and hid what we still owned, mainly our humanity, until, of course, the coast was clear.

Of course, we had orgasms…with descendants to prove it.