End of the World?

          Happy New Year! So far 2012 hasn’t had the usual fresh start, clean slate, new year feeling. On the one hand it’s HAPPY New Year, but on the other hand is it Happy FINAL Year? With all the speculation that the world will end in 2012, there is a Y2K on steroids feel to the start of this year.

          According to some scholars of the Mayan calendar, the world will end on December 21, 2012. The History Channel has aired many special series on doomsday that include analysis of 2012 theories, such as Decoding the Past (2005–2007), 2012, End of Days (2006), Last Days on Earth (2006), Seven Signs of the Apocalypse (2007), and Nostradamus 2012 (2008). The Discovery Channel also aired 2012 Apocalypse in 2009, suggesting that massive solar storms, magnetic pole reversal, earthquakes, supervolcanoes, and other drastic natural events may occur in 2012. Author Graham Hancock, in his book Fingerprints of the Gods, interpreted Coe's remarks in Breaking the Maya Code as evidence for the prophecy of a global cataclysm. Others are analyzing the Book of Revelations in the Bible for clues. One of my friends told me that he heard that the last day will be on my birthday. Woo Hoo!

          It’s not unusual to start a new year with prophecies about what the coming year will bring. It’s also not unusual for the prophecies to be negative or punitive. There’s something in human nature that loves an impending disaster, but these end of the world predictions have taken new year predictions to the ultimate level. The problem (or blessing) with the predictions is that most of them never come true. However, we tend to focus on the few that do come true, or twist them into seeming like they came true.

I’m just happy when the weather is accurately predicted. I remember watching a weather forecaster banter with a sportscaster a few years ago. The sportscaster was giving the weatherman a hard time about getting his forecast totally wrong. The weatherman defended himself by saying he got it right half the time. The sportscaster countered by saying he could do get it right 50% of the time by flipping a coin. The weatherman turned red and went to commercial break.

        So, if we can’t predict current events like the weather within the next three days with all our knowledge, instruments, and satellites out in space, how in the heck could the Mayans, an ancient culture, know what was going to happen in 2012? Do we apply Mayan wisdom to anything else in our daily lives? Do we even know if we’ve interpreted the Mayan calendar correctly? Other than eating food from other cultures, and importing/exporting clothing and out of season produce, we don’t even use that much from other cultures currently on the globe. Suddenly, when it comes to the end of the world, we’re going with the Mayans?

Bizarro Comic by Dan Piraro.

        When everyone was scurrying around preparing for the potential Y2K disaster (computers not programmed to change from 1999 to 2000), my husband John predicted accurately that nothing would happen. He summed it up with a New Yorker’s street smarts, “Do you really think our whole society’s going to crash because of a computer glitch? There’s BIG money at stake. Don’t worry, they’ll figure out how to fix it.”

 We survived Y2K, 1970s recessions, and a childhood filled with monthly drills crouched under school desks in case the Soviet Union hit us with nuclear bombs. 

As for the end of the world, I predict that most of us will be sitting around on January 1, 2013 feeling stupid. Some will be saying that the calculations were slightly off—2013 will be the final year because 13 is unlucky.

In the meantime, my resolution for 2012 and future years is to continue trying to live a life with no regrets, and embrace those who I love because even though I don’t think the entire world is going to end, you never know when an individual’s world will end. Sometimes life is too short, and it is always unpredictable.

Laura Keolanui Stark is making sure she eats dessert first every once in awhile. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.