While many others have posted very compelling comments on yesterday’s apocalypse, I think there’s room for a more lighthearted look at what was supposed to happen but didn’t.
- The History Channel has become the Hysteria Channel. For too many months, the History Channel’s programming has been obsessed with apocalyptic programming. We’ve been pestered with programs about Nostradamus, the Mayans, any number of predictions and forewarnings of the cataclysmic end, code decoding, and the Book of Revelations. All of them were, and are, exercises in speculation and hyperbole. They’ve put every wide-eyed wacko they could find in front of the camera to prognosticate on everything from the alien-engineered pyramids to the hidden meaning encoded into the expiration date on a box of Wheaties (ok, maybe not Wheaties, but you get the idea).
- It just could be that the Mayans weren’t predicting anything. All calendars have to end somewhere. There’s just happened to end yesterday. I mean, how good can they be at predicting the future when they seemed to have missed their own demise at the hands of the Conquistadors? That ranks up there with the bankruptcy of the Psychic Network on cable TV (they didn’t see that coming?) and when the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association announced that “Eternity” would end when the year concluded (“Eternity” was their monthly magazine).
- Most people are logical and reasonable. Some are just nuts! Yesterday there were huge crowds at some small mountain in France waiting for alien spacecraft to lift off and take them away from the collapsing earth. Some told off their boss, maxxed out their credit cards, and left their spouses for a last fling before it all ended.
- No one ever established the sequence of the apocalypse. I mean, just how were we supposed to get ready when we weren’t told the time. Were the Mayans in the Atlantic time zone or were they referring to Greenwich Mean time (now called UTC)? If they could see so far ahead as to know when the end was coming, couldn’t they have foreseen the establishment of time zones and their universal acceptance. It was really thoughtless of the Mayans to have been so lax about such an important event. So, was the end coming later for those across the international date line? It could be that some had to wait until today because yesterday was then and now is the then that those people experienced back when! Just how long were we supposed to wait for that alien space craft anyway? I mean really! Why couldn’t the Mayans have been more specific?
Well, I’m glad to still be looking at the right side of the grass. Hope you are too!