The way that today (12.21.12) has been built up as the end of the world, I can’t help but feel like some people are probably disappointed. We have heard for years that the end is nigh, because the Mayan calendar says it’s so…So what gives?
We wake up today and there’s no nuclear launch attacks. We eat lunch and there’s no comet hurtling towards Earth. It’s almost midnight, and the aliens still haven’t made first contact (tick tick tick tick, clock’s winding down guys…might want to hurry up if there’s no traffic).
Several prognosticators tried to save face today by saying that the calendar might be slightly off and maybe they forecasted the wrong year. Yeah…maybe they were just off by a year or two, and the end is still–Oh God…don’t they say that after every failed doomsday scenario? [The late, not-so-great Reverend Harold Camping predicted the end of the world roughly a half-dozen times and it was always stalled because he’d made some mathematical error…And people went along with it because it’s easier to believe their prophet was shitty at math instead of just a fraud.]
I never bought into the idea that the world would end today. [No matter how many Roland Emmerich movies I saw.] But I did always hope that something significant might happen.
And that would be more in what the Mayans actually meant. The end of their calendar cycles never meant the world would end. Rather, that a new cycle would take its place, one thing “ends” so another, possibly-better thing can begin, a changing more than anything permanent.
So I’d hoped——–hoped, not thought——-maybe the war in Afghanistan would wrap up early today. Congo would decide they’ve had enough bloodshed. The Koch Brothers would donate the entirety of their immense wealth to rebuilding Haiti’s infrastructure and food supplies. Or, maybe something more universal, like aliens. But that’s ridiculous…the Koch Brothers would never donate their money to poor black people.
Oh well, I guess as long as there are people unsatisfied with the direction the world is headed in, there will be people hoping for the end of the world. [The religious nuts that think a world must end because it no longer needs them; the lunatics stockpiling weapons and hoping for an apocalypse to hit the restart button instead of investing in a GED and a better life; bigots that think a race war must be on the horizon because a black man is in the White House.] But, hopefully, there will always be those that merely think the world needs to better itself…And they did find some alien-looking skulls in Mexico today.