If this date means absolutely nothing other than you have three days left to buy Christmas presents, then I applaud you.
If the date, however, means you believe this is when the world ends, you belong in that insane group of conspiracy nuts who claim our government agents actually piloted those jets into the World Trade Center on 9/11. That bombs placed inside the Twin Towers caused their collapse, not the heat from burning jet fuel that weakened the buildings’ steel structures.
If you haven’t already noticed articles in magazine about 12/21/12 or the slew of books in the New Age & Spirituality section at bookstores, it’s a good bet you will know the meaning of the date when Hollywood’s big budget disaster movie, “2012”, is released.
Originally set to open last summer, “2012” stars John Cusack and Amanda Peet and is directed by Noah Emmerich, who unleashed Mother Nature’s fury in “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004) and gave aliens inside giant pancakes carte blanche to incinerate landmarks from the White House to the Empire State Building in “Independence Day” (1996).
“2012” opened in theaters Nov. 13, 2009. Friday the 13th to be exact, perhaps the perfect date to release a movie about humanity biting the big one. The only other time studios look to cash in on the superstitious date is when they release a slasher pic about a guy in a hockey mask named Jason who around knocking off young college kids at a campground called Crystal Lake.
Perhaps you’ve seen “2012’s” big promotional cardboard display at theaters showing what resembles a continent of cities and suburbs falling into the ocean. I wonder if it’s that part of America that’s been referred to as “The Blubber Belt”; the juncture where we will finally pay the price f0r being so obese because the land we live on can no longer sustain our increasing weight.
Watching the trailer, I couldn’t help but laugh seeing the aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy, being flipped over by a giant tidal wave that washes away the White House.
This brings me to the subject of entertainment, which when you get down to it is all “2012,” the movie really is. It’s not about the Mayans, though their unseen presence does play a significant role in the film and the main reason for Mother Earth’s destruction. Leave it to the doomsayers to twist what is nothing more than an end date of the Mayan calendar.
“There’s going to be a whole generation of people, who, when they think of the Maya, think of 2012, and to me that’s just criminal,” said David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas at Austin in an article on CNN’s website. “There is no serious scholar who puts any stock in the idea that the Maya said anything meaningful about 2012.”
Even “2012” director Roland Emmerich doesn’t believe the world is on collision course with Doomsday.
“I’m a pretty down-to-earth guy,” Emmerich said on Yahoo! Movie Talk earlier this year. “Even though I made movies about aliens, I don’t believe in aliens. And I don’t believe the world will come to an end in 2012, but it’s a great scenario.”
The idea we will all perish on Dec. 21, 2012, is becoming as much a mass marketing fad, if not a fraud, the way businesses capitalized on President Barack Obama’s inauguration last January with hundreds of trinkets being ridiculously referred to as collector’s items. Obama was even seen in a Marvel Comics issue of Spider-man aptly titled “Election Day.”
Go to AOL.com and type in “2012” under the search bar and you get 19.6 million articles. Yahoo’s search engine reveals 712 million. At Google, you get 191 million searches. Type in “2012” at amazon.com and you’ll find 67,359 books on just the year alone versus the 245 “all products” listing on the subject at Barnes and Noble’s website.
This is just in 2009. How many more falsehoods will flood the Internet, bookstore and the entertainment industry before the “fateful” date hits?
All things must come to an end, much like the mass-marketed, so-called “positive” change honeymoon that was Obama’s inauguration. Eventually this senseless controversy surrounding 2012 will subside but not until after doomsayers wake up the morning of Dec. 22, three years from now, to find out, much to their dismay, that we’re all still here.
So much for the $100 I was hoping to save that Christmas on gift cards for family members. As usual, that’s money I will never see again.
I hope before this so-called apocalypse hits, I meet a doomsayer so I can ask him such questions as “Why do you want to die?” Where is the celebration in seeing the world go up in a series of catastrophes? Don’t you realize that if some asteroid the size of Texas hits us or the Moon collides with Earth, or we get into some kind of nuclear Armageddon that’s not just “us” who will perish but you, as well?
I am not denying that an afterlife doesn’t exist where things for people will be far better or worse for them in the next world, depending on their religious beliefs on God, Heaven, Hell, and eternal bliss and damnation. When our world ends, however, that’s it.
Then again, anyone who has read the Bible should know there is no date or time predicted when the world will end, despite all the bad things happening right now (the Swine Flu outbreak, world disasters, the collapsing economy, the continuing confrontation with North Korea, Iran, and al-Qaeda, and humanity’s immoral compass that goes against God’s laws) that some die-hard religious zealots say are signs we are living in “The End Times.”
So, excuse me if I play devil’s advocate and say I think all this stuff about the world ending in 2012 is a load of crap. Recall the scene in “2012” where John Cusack laughs off the idea with his kids saying, “What are the odds” before being bombarded with meteors as they’re driving through Yellowstone National Park? I don’t foresee meteors raining down on me as I’m driving down I-635 on my way to work at 3 p.m. three days before Christmas, three years from now.
But look at this way, doomsayers. There is hope for you 27 years from now. Astronomers say that’s when the 880 megaton Apophis asteroid will supposedly hit Earth.
The date will be April 13, 2036. Do you doomsayers have that already marked on your future calendars?
©11/18/09
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