As Americans prepare to vote for the candidate that will make them feel the least regret the following morning, another vote has gone down at the highest levels of our universe. Sources now confirm that humans have been granted a stay of execution for their crimes against, well, everyone and everything, and the reason? Social media activism.
“Yeah, we voted. It was close. But it’s really hard to ignore the testimony,” one angel said on condition of anonymity. “We were gonna shut the whole goddamn thing down, you know—really go four horsemen on all of humanity—but then we saw all the Instagram reposts on social and environmental justice, and we thought there might be something worth saving here. There was one—I’ll never forget it—@yasqueen1984 reposted an Instagram story repost on how we all need to ‘unpack white feminism,’ and we were all like, ‘Yeah, we do. We really do. And that clinched it—no apocalypse today.’”
In a formal statement released earlier, Heavenly Tribunal authorities declared, “Humanity is hanging by a thread,” and that thread appears to be digital. “Humans are the worst,” said Uriel, one of the spokesangels who authored the statement and agreed to talk to us. “I mean, where do I start? Environmental destruction, terrorism, identity politics, Eminem’s new album, and the list goes on. But when I see bright, free-thinking college intellectuals coming together to recycle each other’s content and declare their authentic selves, how can I not be hopeful? The sheer volume of ‘From the River to the Sea’ stories has already brought us so much closer to rational discourse and common ground. With another few thousand ‘Intifada Revolution’ posts, we expect a total resolution of the Israel-Hamas conflict and the peace we’ve all been praying for in the Middle East.”
Sources have confirmed that reposting any Instagram story with the words “systemic racism,” “sexualized,” “toxic,” “settler-colonial,” “social justice,” and “intersectional” is the key to humanity’s salvation. Such reposts, researchers say, rank well ahead of material efforts to understand and engage with the complexities of contemporary issues. “It’s just more efficient,” said one Brown University researcher who did not want to be named for fear of saying anything, really. “I mean, all that thinking and discourse—why bother if you can just copy someone else’s content? And hell, if you get good at it, you’ve got a career in politics or consulting.”
But not everyone is as optimistic. Critics contend that while reposting Instagram stories may make some users feel good, it is just a form of virtue signaling. While official sources at Instagram have yet to return our calls, one insider did say this on condition he would not be quoted in anything people would read: “What could be more genuinely meaningful than taking 2.7 seconds of your own time to express someone else’s thoughts on a subject you know incredibly little about?”
Virtue signaling or not, social media activism appears to be here to stay, and that’s good news for at least one angel who voted to delay humanity’s demise. “Let humans stick to Instagram story reposts,” Raziel said. “I don’t want them out there doing actual things, like real activism. What they touch turns to shit—literally. Take the beaches—I get it when a New Jersey beach shuts down with a fecal matter alert. People who live in Jersey can’t tell a toilet seat from an inflatable, but Ontario? It’s everywhere, man, and so we’re like talking in the Heavenly Tribunal, and Gabriel over there, he’s like, ‘We’d rather humans not do anything at all.’”
Authorities are working to determine whether Azrael (@AngelOfDeath) really meant it when he said a few performative Instagram reposts weren’t going to stop him from waging a cosmic extinction event on humanity. But for now, we live to fight and post another day, knowing that every “add to story” and “@mention” brings us just a little closer to salvation.