It’s the End of the World As We Know It (The Joke Should Be Here But It’s Not)

When I was about 12, I got to extend my bedtime on the weekends to being as late as I wanted it to be, as long as I wasn’t doing anything I wasn’t supposed to. So since my parents didn’t know about the porn I was watching on CinaMax, I made pretty good use of this time. One of thise first things I did was start making use of the radio that was in my room and listened to shitty music all night.

One night, I got antsy. The porn wasn’t very good, and I was getting tired of hearing the same 5 songs played ad nasuem. So I switched to AM to see what AM actually was. Turns out, AM is mostly Garrison Keillor and fat conversatives talking about how smart they are. One of the first things that I heard was a cranky conspiracy theorist talking about 2012, when apparently, we are all going to die. The entire theory was based around the fact that the Mayan calander was going to end on December 21st, 2012. Then we were, in scientific terms, totally boned.

As the little 12 year old that I was, this scared the hell out of me. I didn’t want to die, and really, I still don’t, surprising as that may be. But some guy on the radio said it, and he had evidence to back it up, so it must be true. Then I remembered that this was not the first time that the entire world was going to die off in a mass exstinction event. On January 1st, 2000, the world was supposed to descend into chaos, or Jesus was supposed to come back and kill people or something. It was one or the other, depending on who you asked.

The Mayan calander one, unlike the 2000 thing, has been around a lot longer and has a lot more speculation. Plus, the 2000 scare was base much less on actual death than it was based on computers shutting down. So this does make the 2012 talk a tad more interesting, a little more respectable. Until you learn that the main thing driving the entire theory is actually wrong.

See, like I mentioned above, the entire theory is based upon the idea that the Mayan calander mysteriously ends on December 21st, 2012. People speculate that this happens because the Mayan people knew something that we do not. That they were more spiritually aware of the world around us. But once you actually educate yourself, you find that the calander does not actually end in 2012.

What does end in 2012 is a Baktun cycle, a 400 year cycle that simply flips over to a new Baktun cycle when one ends. As of now, we are currently in the 12th cycle. All that will happen in 2012 is that we will proceed to enter the 13th cycle. No fuss, no muss, friends. Cycles like this have flipped over for thousands of years, with no problem. What makes this one so special and unique? I can’t figure it out, since every website, author, and TV pundit that talks about it ignores the fact that we’re only ending a cycle, not the calender itself.

Why this belief has spread falsely, I don’t understand. My theory is that one guy got it wrong, but it sounded really good, so it spread, like gossip in a high school cafeteria. Now it’s become a commonly held belief, even by people who disagree with the “end of the world” part. Which really bugs me. It’s cool if you think we’re all gonna die, but at least base it in real facts and not in something that was made up just to make a point. Like the Bible. Hmm…blasphemy.

Humans seem to have a weird obsession with trying to put a date on our demise. One of the most well-known parts of the Bible deals with our death as a species, a gigantic bulk of fiction has been based on human exstinction, and most of our well-loved wacky cult leaders use their visions of some sort of end-times to gain membership to their Kool-Aid parties.

I can understand it to a point. Imagining all of the possible ways that the entire human race can die out is a fun way to spend a sunny afternoon, on par with golfing, vollyball, and grave-robbing. But what starts out as funny theories by right-wing nutjobs and stupid hippies, or in rare cases, right-wing hippies (hippies that hate gays and poor people), gets annoying pretty quickly. After a while, it’s easy to get sick of people being so sure that they’re going to be the ones to predict the death of the human race, despite the fact that people have been sure of themselves for thousands of years now. The odds aren’t looking good for you, so unless you’ve created some kind of super-virus, I’d reccommend against trying to predict the end of the world.

Religious people especially like to tell everyone that we’re living in the end times. In fact, if Christians had been right, no one reading this would have ever existed because jazz musicians and women voting would have actually been what caused Jesus to come back and kill us all. I understand this. When Jesus and if Jesus comes back, religious people all over the world will be proven correct. And who wouldn’t love to run around like a self-important jerk and laugh in everyone’s face? Sure, Jesus will disapprove of your gloating, but Jesus has no real place in religion.

When I was in 5th grade, during 1999, I got to watch first hand as people got the shit scared out of them due to the 2000 scare. Tabloids in supermarkers carried pictures of Jesus pointing angrily at various celebrities, making sure that they knew there time was up. People were panicking everywhere, and my little 10 year old self was freaking the fuck out. I was convinced that at the stroke of midnight that year, I would suddenly see fire spring up around me, while demons jumped around stabbing everyone. When midnight hit and none of that happened, I grew up a little. I would never be duped into thinking that I was going to die just because of a bunch of ill-informed hype.

Yet adults everywhere, after being duped time after time, still keep believing it every single time. How can you buy into panic to turn out to be wrong time and time again and not start questioning the validity of these claims? Being a skeptic is a bad thing when you’re not leaving your mind open at all, but at least being a little cynical when people are trying to scare you into a panic for no reason but to sell books about their little theories.

It’s not that I don’t have some spiritual leanings. Since I first heard the 2012 theories, I’ve looked into them quite a bit, and through that have learned about a lot of things that I know belief in, such as some sort of spirit dimension, astral projection, and EVP. But at the same time, I can’t believe something that’s based in a blatantly wrong fact. Something that’s being sold as a way to scare people by people on websites that also link to webcams of girls with penises having sex with dogs.

Now listening toSilver Ray- This is Silver Ray.