So, you opened your eyes on a bright December 21st and then again to the shining sun of the next day? The Mayan calendar, which no decent doomsday forecaster could read, proved unable to successfully predict any mysterious planets or killer asteroids. As we all know, the asteroids are a proud bunch. You don’t call them; they come as they please. Still, the point rings loud and clear: you and the rest of the world are not dead.
With this fact in mind, the opinion could end quickly and quietly by declaring our culture’s need for a worst-case scenario. Then again, we could draw it out, speculating beneath a starry night sky the reason we need a hefty dose of mass mortality. However, I’ll end up doing neither of those things and just sort of settle on an interesting compromise.
Let’s all gather now to remember those prophesized versions of the coming apocalypse bloated, by movies and literature, to an almost endless variety. Zombies hankered for brains, becoming generally rank
after months of un-life. The self-reliant asteroids left humanity in a heap of ash. Slews of natural disasters swamped our coasts and folded the great capitals into earthquake tortillas. Finally, Iranian-North Korean-Russians dropped one imperial nuke.
With all our choices in mind, the end of days became great fun, even for those of us with a creeping suspicion of blood in the streets. It lifted friends from depression and coaxed strangers to talk. “What if the world ends in December?”
After referencing the end of the world, it was only sensible to have a pointless argument. Did the Mayans actually mean the “world” would “end?” Y2K never happened, so why invest in this crapshoot? Predictably, those arguments were neither won nor lost. The Mayan long count was never seriously consulted in the case of our planet bursting in half with celestial earth-juices flying willy-nilly. Like Trekkies and wine snobs, we all had a chance to be specialists on a topic with no definitive expert. It was a game of which no one could tire. Even old nags criticizing the flexed ego hid a little smirking delight.
While we joked andfought over doomsday mumbo jumbo, it quietly became a distraction. Precluding the looming threat to babies and kittens, 2012 held other, more immediate, anxieties. A Pakistani girl suffered a Taliban issued gunshot to the head. The body count in Syria grew. Our decade- long wars culminated
in droves of Afghan and Pakistani country folk blown away day after day via remote control. Even normal citizens found themselves shoved in front of subway trains and victims to one mass shooting or another. The job market and election needed no introduction. If this was every day life, a good apocalypse was preferable.
Like all small mercies, it was spared us, and we currently float adrift in the days following Dec. 23, waking up again and again, breaking the charm. But rest assured, we should all expect a new fear of the year, rendered harmless in its magnitude. Our next fixation will arrive promptly to administer humanity a vital dose of laughter and amnesia.
