Celebrating Doomsday

When I set out to write a year of blogs, it was not only a Leap Year (making my task 366 blogs, rather than the infinitely easier 365 of other years), it was also the year that contained the dreaded date 12/21/12—the end of the Mayan long count b’ak’tun.  On this day, many believed, the world would come to an end.  Period.  Finito.  

I have never been one to subscribe to planned apocalypse theories, believing that when our world ends it will be due to the random, miscalculated act of a lunatic rather than by design or fate.  Based on what I have read about Mayan record keeping, it is not likely that the end of the calendar is a prediction of doom.  Rather, it is more likely that the ancient Mayans simply stopped counting at the completion of a long cycle.  They were a people who liked balance and symmetry, particularly in numbers.  The long count calendar was a multiplicative series based on artifacts of nature that spanned over 5,000 years; they had reached a natural stopping point and were tired.  Perhaps, with that established point so far off, they simply had no immediate need to continue, making the carving in stone of the following cycle what we in the business world refer to as “next guy’s problem.”  The abrupt end to their calendar only seems abrupt to us because we live at this particular moment in time.

It is easy to understand why the next cycle of the Mayan calendar was never undertaken.  Blame the Spanish conquistadors who fought through the 16^th and 17^th Centuries to overtake the Mayans, altering the trajectory of their civilization.  Like our own Native Americans, who became either assimilated or disenfranchised, the blending of European cultures with indigenous ones gave rise to new traditions.  Although there continue to be pockets of Mayan cultures and Mayan-speaking peoples throughout the Yucatan in modern times, they have adopted many of the trappings of the modern world—our standard calendar among them.  Perhaps this series of unfortunate events has them believing that their world ended long ago.

I plan to wake up today and check that my blog posted, just like I have done every day for the last 355 days.  In the days leading up to today, I bought green bananas, paid my bills, washed my car, and finished wrapping some gifts for my children.  We will not be able to absolve ourselves of the mess we have created by clinging to an old prophesy or an ancient misinterpretation.  All the problems of yesterday remain for us to solve.  It's just another day where partisanship, violence, hatred, automatic weapons, prejudice, domestic abuse, and social injustice run rampant. 

Of course, if I am wrong, I predict a record low number of hits on my blog today.