Thursday, December 20, 2012

The End Is Near: Terminal Hysteria or Blessed Hope?



It has begun – "it" being the end of the world. Of people, time, cluttered closets, the IRS, the fiscal cliff, final exams, leftover Thanksgiving turkey. The end of everything.

We won't even need Obamacare.

Some interpretations of an old Mayan calendar seem to predict the finale of something or other on December 21. Is it a "baktun"-cycle that terminates, or the whole world?

Hysterics everywhere are going with the latter. One man in China has built himself an ark, a big boat on which he hopes to ride out the end. Another Chinese craftsman's ark is actually a 13-foot steel sphere in which he will survive the end whether by land or sea safe as a pit in a big round olive.

Some anxious folk are trekking to the French Pyrenees, where a UFO is parked up in the mountains waiting to waft the wise into safe space. Unless, of course, they collide with planet Niburu, which others believe will zip out of its concealment on the backside of the sun and crash into earth. Then again the alien lifeboat could get caught in the gullet of that huge black hole some Mayan calendar buffs predict will swallow us all.

Meanwhile, New Agers and other spiritists are booking hotel rooms near Chichen Itza, the Mexican site of Mayan ruins. I've been there, and fascinating as it is, between the air-sucking heat, nosy iguanas, and squadrons of flying pests I wished for the end too. Read more

Read also:
The End of the World? Been There. Done That.

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