Apocalypse Now--Mayan Style

What? I missed it? What are you talking about; didn’t the world actually come to an end last week? Of course it did, and this column is really taking place on some other plane, right?

Really, who would believe that the Mayan culture, some thousands of years ago, would foresee the end of the world as we know it? It’s not as if this is some kind of Atlantean vision of the future. The waters didn’t rise, the earth didn’t shatter, and the stars didn’t fall from the firmament. I mean, we are all right, right?

I am here and if you are reading this I have to assume that you are here too. Although, I have been wrong in the past, I somehow think my logic in this regard is pretty straight on. Still, how some people reacted is just so human, all too human actually.

To think that the world is populated by the kinds of people who believe that some ancient culture’s calendar might in anyway whatsoever control the details of our wonderful modern life is just ludicrous. Rave on, I say!

Still, the papers report thousands of mystics, hippies, and tourists celebrated at ancient Mayan pyramids in southeastern Mexico waiting for the prophecy to be fulfilled. Tell me that again, and I will tell you about tales of the dangers of the Y2K bug. And yet, I know there are people who insist that all the hard work by IT technicians save the world that time.

Ha. Forget the likes of Bernie Madoff, his scam is a child’s bad joke compared to the boondoggle that was Y2K. The best thing about Y2K is it gave new life to a bunch of old school COBOL and FORTRAN coders who had been out of work for years because of the dead computer programming languages. Ironically, they were brought back in for a last ditch effort to link the old and new and try to sidestep supposedly cataclysmic problems that were to come about due to the date change from 1900 to 2000.

We were supposed to believe that all these brilliant minds had forgotten to allow the computers to handle dates that began with a 2 instead of a 1. Hogwash. Yes, there were actually a few isolated incidents, like the 105 year old man who received a harsh letter from the local school board about his need to attend kindergarten. They thought he was only 5. Most of the problems the public experienced were more nuisance than cataclysm.

And here we have gone again with this whole Mayan Apocalypse thing. It’s ironic enough that Mayan ancestors told the media that they didn’t believe that stuff. And yet, here we are, homo-simpleton, eating it up like pablum.

For the record, the 21^st of December was merely the end of the Mayan’s 13^th bak’tun, a period of about 400 years in the Mayan long calendar.  Let’s not take into account in our logic that it is indeed the 13th such event, doesn’t it just make sense to hang another calendar on the wall, this one maybe made of paper instead of stone, than it does to think everything is going to come to a screeching halt. For me it does.

But thanks to our vast communication sources today we were able to get all the loonies on the same path. From the History channel to the Internet, everyone was exploiting the end of the world. And yet, those shows were designed to make money for somebody, and if we were all going to the happy hunting ground somewhere else, what need would we have for money, after all?

Well, it’s the day before Christmas and all through the house, not an apocalypse was stirring, not even a tsunami. So, as I break open the 14^th bak’tun, let me wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.