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January 3, 2012
2012 - It’s the End of the World As We Know It
By: Diane Becker
The website offers a unique gift. It’s “the last calendar you’ll ever need.” If you haven’t heard yet, you will. December 12, 2012 is when it’s all supposed to come to a screeching halt. It’s all made plain in the ancient Mayan calendars, which come to an abrupt end on December 12 of this year.
Some Mayan experts say that people are reading too much into this. The people who wrote the calendar were just starting a new cycle but there’s no fun in that and there isn’t advertising dollars either. There’s at least three ads sponsored by some major corporations continually rotating on the December122012.com website.
You can also buy all sorts of t-shirts on the site. It seems that the people who think the world will end in less than a year want to accumulate some money in the meantime.
I have a feeling we’re going to get really tired of hearing about 12-12-12. There’s supposedly a countdown clock in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, where Mayan priests officially performed an end of the world ceremony.
This all vaguely reminds me of the turn of the millennium but those predictions were more believable. It seemed much more likely that the computers, which run much of our daily lives, weren’t going to be able to handle going to 2000. But they did. I do remember not being able to use our credit card in a grocery store on January 1, 2000 because they had to do a little more reconfiguring. Quite the apocalypse.
There is a long list of “believers” on the December 12 site, hundreds of them actually, as you can enter your name if you think the world will end next near. There is a funny thing I noticed. They listed all the states that are represented and Nebraska is missing from the list. Maybe most people here just haven’t seen the site, or maybe we’re just too busy doing the whole living life thing.
Not sure how all the true 12-12-12 believers will be adjusting their lives this year—I hope they don’t do anything too drastic, like quit their jobs and selling their homes to live on some mountain until next December.
Not in Nebraska. This year we’ll be doing things like planting our crops and the researchers in Nebraska will be thinking of important things like better crop traits so we can feed the expected 38 percent increase in world population in the next 40 years. 2050, not 2012, is a year people ought to be thinking about. It’s expected that we’ll have an estimated 9.5 billion people on earth by then. Those extra people won’t all be farmers and they won’t be making their own food in their backyards. They’re going to depend on someone else for that— like the United States farmers and ranchers, who supply most of that food.
So the Smashing Pumpkins Band believes 12-12-12 is the end. Hope they don’t waste a lot of time and energy on it. We’ve got more important things to work on.