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Sunday, October 11th, 2009
2012: It's an ELECTION, not a DESTRUCTION!
Sunday, October 11th, 2009 02:04 pm.
Are you getting as sick as I am of all this OMG THE WRLD WILLEND WTFBBQ!!!11!!! nonsense? Well apparently, so are the Maya:
( 2012 isn't the end of the world, Mayans insist )
Hoo-boy. What is it with the constant insistence that disaster is just around the corner? Not only is it infantile and melodramatic, it's a prime example of how infinitesimally short modern memory is. As the article points out, people never seem to remember the LAST time we all ran around like chickens with our heads cut off. Remember Y2K? Civilization as we knew it was gonna collapse!!! What happened? A few toasters stopped working. WOW.
I find it especially amusing that nobody is listening to the REAL Mayans, who are all shrugging their shoulders and saying the gringos are nuts. It's a classic case of Western cultures projecting their own fixations onto other people - the Mayas never said the world was going to end in 2012. They just said that a particular era would end, but that doesn't mean the world will stop, for gods' sakes. That's like saying the planet will be destroyed in 2050 (or whenever) because we'll stop using petroleum then. It's nonsense, just an outcropping of the fascination with doomsday scenarios that was put into motion by the Book of Revelation, that bizarre afterthought add-on to the Christian Bible. (Why anyone would put any store in what are clearly the ravings of a lunatic mind is beyond me, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.)
So we can all relax. The world isn't going anywhere, the Mayans are more interested in whether they'll get good rain for their crops this year, and all this doomsday hoo-hah is just a PR storm drummed up for what appears to be yet another badly-written mediocre FX movie. *yawn*
Are you getting as sick as I am of all this OMG THE WRLD WILLEND WTFBBQ!!!11!!! nonsense? Well apparently, so are the Maya:
( 2012 isn't the end of the world, Mayans insist )
Hoo-boy. What is it with the constant insistence that disaster is just around the corner? Not only is it infantile and melodramatic, it's a prime example of how infinitesimally short modern memory is. As the article points out, people never seem to remember the LAST time we all ran around like chickens with our heads cut off. Remember Y2K? Civilization as we knew it was gonna collapse!!! What happened? A few toasters stopped working. WOW.
I find it especially amusing that nobody is listening to the REAL Mayans, who are all shrugging their shoulders and saying the gringos are nuts. It's a classic case of Western cultures projecting their own fixations onto other people - the Mayas never said the world was going to end in 2012. They just said that a particular era would end, but that doesn't mean the world will stop, for gods' sakes. That's like saying the planet will be destroyed in 2050 (or whenever) because we'll stop using petroleum then. It's nonsense, just an outcropping of the fascination with doomsday scenarios that was put into motion by the Book of Revelation, that bizarre afterthought add-on to the Christian Bible. (Why anyone would put any store in what are clearly the ravings of a lunatic mind is beyond me, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.)
So we can all relax. The world isn't going anywhere, the Mayans are more interested in whether they'll get good rain for their crops this year, and all this doomsday hoo-hah is just a PR storm drummed up for what appears to be yet another badly-written mediocre FX movie. *yawn*
