Email This StoryPoint of View: 2012 paranoia yielding undue concern
Nov. 20, 2009
By Sommer Ingram
Let's fast-forward three years, one month and one day.
December 21, 2012: the date the world, including you and me, will cease to exist.
For some years now, the end to the 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar has been anticipated. Along with the resetting of this calendar supposedly will come a catastrophic end to the entire world as we know it.
Breakaway oceans and continents will dump cities into the sea. Massive tidal waves, shattering earthquakes and unprecedented volcanic eruptions will wreck havoc across the planet, leaving the earth just a crusty, hollow shell of what it once was. The sun will become nothing more than a black splotch in the sky. There's no way to stop it -- only the prepared will survive.
Forgive me, but I simply don't believe it. Yes, the Mayan civilization is responsible for providing the basis for many mathematical and scientific guidelines, but for all the hype, there is little evidence that these people ever intended for their calendar to spur the neurosis of our society.
Scholars, including astronomers, have gone on the record saying that it would be essentially impossible for the Mayans to have predicted the end of the world.
Susan Milbrath, a Maya archaeoastronomer and a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, was quoted saying that, "We have no record or knowledge that they would think the world would come to an end at that point."
Yet the madness continues.
The buildup to 2012 echoes the fear and paranoia surrounding the new millennium, orY2K, though on a smaller scale. As a 10-year-old, I didn't fully understand how man could predict the ending of a world God created. And I still don't, today.
A simple Google search of the term "2012 end of the world" will leave you with countless books, Web sites and the like engineered by people playing the role of God in predicting just how the world will end.
Some say the north and south poles are preparing to reverse positions in a magnetic flip, causing major confusion. Plans have been drawn up to buy plots of land high up in African mountain land where the beastly tidal waves won't be able to reach.
Some accounts predict that a strangely-named planet will crash into us, hurling deadly asteroids at us at best and obliterating our entire planet at worst. But these claims have been made before and have been proven wrong.
"If there were a planet or a brown dwarf or whatever that was going to be in the inner solar system three years from now, astronomers would have been studying it for the past decade and it would be visible to the naked eye by now," NASA astrobiologist Morrison said. "It's not there."
And now, with the release of the dramatic movie "2012," paranoia is reigning at an all-time high. Hollywood took this and ran, maximizing play on irrational emotions. Already the total U.S. gross has reached $74,903,880.
Oftentimes these movements that predict the end of the world go much deeper and reflect fears about the state of our society as a whole.
John Hall, a professor of sociology at the University of California Davis who is writing a book on the history of apocalyptic ideas, said, "Terrorism, 9/11 ecological disasters, floods and earthquakes -- there is a sense that modern civilization has had its run. Those kinds of anxieties are much more widely shared than simply among people who believe in the exact date."
So before going to buy an African plot of land to hide out on, the public should stop to consider what it's really afraid of. Furthermore, it should seek out scientifically-based information that these scientists are willingly providing.
And beyond that, save the five bucks you would spend this weekend going to see the film -- I hear that "Twilight" movie is pretty good.
Sommer Ingram is a Texarkana junior majoring in political science and the city editor for the Baylor Lariat.
More News ...
