Will an extra-long rainstorm end human life as we know it? What about a few horsemen and some angels with trumpets? Maybe the Earth’s polarity will reverse in 2012, as predicted by ancient peoples without telescopes.

We avoided violent chaos in 2000, as a computer bug threatened to turn modern times into a technological deathtrap (Watch out! Those traffic lights think it’s 1900!), but we were not able to avoid mass hysteria. Indeed, human history can be viewed as an absurd chronicle of conspiracy-theory freak-outs, and we are more than living up to the precedent of paranoia set by our progenitors.

It’s a peculiar human pastime: fantasizing about how society as we know it — our neighbors, our jobs, our monuments, our grocery stores — might be defiled and destroyed in a magnificent fiery burnout.

It’s narcissistic to the core, but also aspirational. Of all the generations on Earth before us, the theorists claim, we are the ones who have been chosen to be attacked by disguised mutants, carved with a flaming sword, thrown into a pit of fire, sacrificed on the altar of Obama socialism, et cetera.

It’s too bad, then, that when the end comes to all of us and life as we know it ceases to be possible, it will not be exciting, and it probably will not be appropriate for popular fiction. We will each come to an individual doom, and our fates will not even be noticed by those whose imaginations are bent on alien spacecraft, the Day of Judgment or foreign invasion (perhaps by our own president).

These inhabitants of make-believe land are unaware that hidden forces are already working against each of us, winnowing out the poor and the unprotected for a fate that can be worse than vaporization by an alien laser or being stepped on by a large creature. And anecdotal evidence suggests that these false prophets, who are only aware of danger when it is fictional, make up a large proportion of our society, and include many of our political leaders.

Imaginary threats surround us. According to one poll, 60 to 70 percent of Southern whites believe, against definitive evidence to the contrary, that our president may be an African usurper. More than a dozen Republican congressmen have refused to explicitly deny this rumor. Other polls have shown that 30 to 40 percent of the population believes that the president is advocating for an American Holocaust led by death panels.

The popular attention is now fixed on these sensationalist but disingenuous dialogues that have less credibility than the Mayan 2012 theory, and even as our gaze focuses at the proverbial but fake monsters threatening our way of life, we look away from the millions of people who toil daily outside of this fictional narrative.

Ask yourself: what aspect of American life resembles most closely the plot of a “Left Behind” novel? Based on what system are a few people chosen to live luxurious lives while millions of others are, well, left behind? What areas in our country most resemble the abandoned detritus left behind by a civilization-threatening monster? What group of people in America could ever be threatened by a flood? Who would suffer the most if fire did rain from the sky, in the form of a new war?

Answering these questions reveals that the true horror is not some rogue state or creeping Marxism, but instead the way we allow the people who surround us in the United States and around the world suffer when we could take steps to help them.

There are monsters that threaten the well-being of our people every day. They are poverty, joblessness, poor health, lack of health insurance, exploitation, psychological disorders, antipathy, consumerism, greed, ignorance, racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia, to list a few.

They are ubiquitous and I say it’s time to drop the fake shit and deal with them. Health care reform is a fine place to start.