“Oh my God, oh my God, we’re all going to die in 2012!”
“Oh my, it’s just a year until our death!”
“Oh, no, and we were so close to Christmas!”
Oh, give me a break.
Think about it. We are all getting freaked out about a supposed Judgment Day…because of a calendar made by a civilization that doesn’t even exist anymore. Anyone else see a problem with that?
Y2K. Everyone went ballistic. “The end is near!” they all cried, and rushed to spend their last moments with loved ones. As Josephine Heacock says in her article “2012 Doomsday Planet X” “The multitude of the reactions of people all over the world has been tremendous, and the world was totally struck with panic then. After the first day of the new millennium, the chaos brought about by fear of the coming of the end of the world eventually died a normal death.” No one hears about that theory anymore, because IT DIDN’T HAPPEN. And neither will 2012.
I learned about this death threat watching the news. The next day I saw a headline sporting the four numbers in the newspaper. Since then, I was not able to get through one day without hearing something about 2012. Gee, thanks a whole lot, media.
I get it, I do. Reporters need work too, and top stories are hard to come by, and, when they do, you want to stretch it out for all that it’s worth. But 2012 has run its course already, and the date is still over a year away. And let us not forget that this is December 2012? The last time I looked at a calendar, December was the very last month of the year.
I guarantee that if the media didn’t have to tell people about 2012, that almost no one would even be aware of it. And a lot less people would believe it too. Ah, what a glorious world that would be.
As Dr. Karl Kruszelnick says in “Great Moments in Science,” “…when a calendar comes to the end of a cycle, it just rolls over into the next cycle. In our Western society, every year 31 December is followed, not by the End of the World, but by 1 January. So 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan calendar will be followed by 0.0.0.0.1 – or good-ol’ 22 December 2012, with only a few shopping days left to Christmas.”
“The base year for the Mayan Long Count starts at 0.0.0.0.0. Each zero goes from 0-19 and each represent a tally of Mayan days.” (O’Neill, 3). This allows the calendar to count for 5126 years. Well apparently, all of our numbers are up once all that time goes down to zero, which is on December 21, 2012.
But does it really have to mean that we’re all going to die? And to all of you that say yes, let me ask you something. Did you have the same answer for Y2K? I thought so.
That is not to say that the Mayan calendar is wrong. It was very accurate in its time, predicting religious dates and such. But it was just not created to go on forever. Or whoever created it just didn’t have a big enough stone, whichever it may be.
According to Ian O’Neill in his article “No Doomsday in 2012,” “The Mayans used many different calendars and viewed time as a meshing of spiritual cycles. While the calendars had practical uses, such as social, agricultural, commercial and administrative tasks, there was a very heavy religious element.” I am a Catholic, however, I don’t let my religion make any decisions for me. And nor do I let other religions make my decisions for me. And no matter what it says in the Bible, I still refuse to believe in 2012.
The only thing that makes 2012 even remotely logical is the interpretation of the Bible to one person. There are 307,006,550 in the U.S. alone. 1/307,006,550. Oh yeah, it’s got to be true.
So don’t worry. Teenage peers, we are going to graduate, and all of our hard work will pay off. Christmas is not going to never come again after this last one, so don’t skip out on buying all your gifts.
If you are one of those skeptics that believe in the Judgment Day that is 2012, and that’s what makes you happy, then by all means, hang on to the superstition. But as for me, I’m going to put my money on seeing December 22, 2012. And if I’m wrong, it doesn’t even matter, because no one will be alive to collect their winnings.