Something I Read on the Internet

          I’d like to start this blog post by sharing a little bit about part of the struggle that I go through everyday. It affects millions, if not billions, of people around the world and causes me a great deal of stress/sleep deprivation, and probably also messes with some of you reading this. I’m talking, of course, about internet-induced insomnia. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve crawled into my bed at a reasonable time for humans to sleep and then spent the next four hours down some wifi rabbit hole that ends with me watching yet another screaming goat video. While its mostly wholesome content, like this tumblr titled “Reasons My Son is Crying,” occasionally I’ll end up in the stranger parts of the internet where people hide behind the anonymity of a screen-name and share whatever rabid thought/opinion/rant that first pops into their minds. 

          My latest internet obsession has a bit of a guilty pleasure feel to it, since I don’t take many of these people seriously, but I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve spent no small number of hours over this past spring break just looking up different conspiracy theories about how the current president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, is obviously the Anti-Christ. Trust me, if you ever have an hour to kill, just google “obama is the antichrist” and prepare to sink waist-deep into a swamp of paranoia and questionable source citations. It is glorious. This being my new hobby and all, imagine the shear glee that I felt the first time someone mentioned to me that “The Bible” on the History Channel has a Satan that looks like Barack Obama. I was beside myself. This television program that I had been avoiding like the plague, mostly because I know that any watered-down, Hollywood version of those stories was going to make me upset, had finally sunk its teeth in me, and as I glared at my phone to make the internet go faster, I realized something: this is exactly what they wanted. Their depiction of Satan looks just enough like our current president to generate more publicity around their program, and I bought into it, if only for a second. It’s genius, if you think about it. The producers of the show, Roma Downey and Mark Burnett took these religious and, lets be honest, racial tensions that are still prevalent in our culture and used them to make more money. Money they will use to fund their sacrifice of puppies to Satan, which is something I read on the internet.