The End of the World
2012’s here and I’m looking forward to it with all the hope and optimism that January affords. I’m expecting great things of myself and it’s all so that at 11:50 on December 31st I won’t be feeling wracked with disappointment in those last 10 minutes of the year. But there’s that thing about 2012. The Mayan, ancient history, we’re all going to be dead soon thing.
Tommy Joeress was a popular lax bro who, like Abbey Norris, I went to school with for 14 years. I don’t care enough about him anymore to go into any more detail than that, because I truly don’t think it’s worth the energy. We all gave senior speeches in front of the whole school and his was about how he honestly believes December 12th, 2012 will be the end of the world.
The idea has been around so long that I think most of us have become desensitized to it. People have talked about it forever. There’s already been a crappy movie made about it.
Y2K was scary for some because it had its roots in science and technology. The thought that our own inventions and our own progress could be the end of society is terrifying, to be sure, since it means that what we’re supposed to be doing (exploring, creating, improving) will bring our downfall. 2012 is rooted in people who thought human sacrifice was a bright idea. There have been no scientific indications that anything it predicts will come to pass. It’s a surviving prediction from a well studied culture that somehow permeated into our popular culture.
Most of us dismiss 2012 from the outset. But it’s not because the idea was founded centuries ago and it’s not because we don’t believe in myths to explain nature and science. That requires actual thought and deliberation on the topic, and most of us, rightly, won’t dignify that kind of time on such a ludicrous subject.
I think the reason we choose not to care outright is because the outcome of such a prediction is so devastating that it’s beyond our comprehension. It requires too much mental energy to even imagine such a scenario. We rightly brush off the idea, but we do it for the wrong reason.
So we’ll go to sleep on December 12th and wake up on December 13th, and once we remember what that means we’ll all breathe a small sigh of relief because we’re just a little more grateful than usual to be breathing at all. That is until some whack job pastor with just enough followers to get press attention does some biblical math and tells us another date that the world will end on. And whenever that story comes up we’ll tense just a little bit.
Because we’re all scared of the world ending. The thought that everything we and everyone around us has ever worked for will mean nothing is horrific. Because even when we tackle the subject of our own deaths, whether eventual or imminent, we can take comfort in the fact that we will be remembered, if only for a short while, if only by the few that loved us, and that the world will carry on. We don’t want to go all together, all at once, because then it will have meant nothing.
There’s no guarantee that I’ll make it to December 12th. Actuarially I have it pretty good, but there are car crashes and fires and freak accidents and plenty of things that will cut things short on the way to getting what I want. And so when someone mentions 2012, we dismiss it so we won’t have to consider this possibility. But we dismiss death all the time. It’s the death of everything that’s so profound. So we don’t dignify it with a second thought. Because then we’d have to explore the fact that one day, whether it’s of our own doing or it’s the natural work of billions of years from now, we will all be gone. But none of us will ever think too hard about that. We’ll put our trust in the future generations, the ones who will have to concern themselves with what they will do, and we won’t spend the time hoping that we won’t fail them.
