by Brigitte Wendel
It’s 2012: the Chinese are celebrating the year of the dragon, seniors are ready to graduate, and President Obama will soon find out whether to make new address labels. But for a select few, 2012 means much more. They believe it could be the end of the world.
For years, people have tried to predict the almighty end. Supposedly, in 2000, all the computers were going to crash because they could not distinguish between 1900 and 2000. Considering I wrote this column on a computer, Y2K was a false alarm. So what is so special about 2012?
Some people think that the planet Nibiru is going to crash into the earth. Those same people said it was going to have impacted in 2003, but they changed the date when their original predictions proved false. They will probably end up changing the date again. Scientists can see meteors coming up to a year in advance, and no threats have shown up on their radar.
Most of the people who believe that the world will end in 2012 cite the power of the Mayan calendar. For over 5,000 years, humans have used the Mayan calendar to predict the future. It has shown us that there are 365 days in a year and which day is the longest and the shortest.
On December 21, 2012, the Mayan Calendar stops and restarts at day 1 – signifying the end of the world. Let’s be real. Even the yearly calendar at Hallmark has an end – every year. The Mayan calendar just happens to end in 2012 after 5,000 years.
According to the famous predictor Nostradamus, December 21, 2012, is just like every other December 21, the beginning of the winter solstice. Except on this day, all of the planets will line up in a straight line with the sun and the Milky Way. Some say when the sun aligns in the center of the Milky Way, blocking some of the energy coming to earth, the world will end. But no scientist has proven that anything drastic will happen, or anything at all.
The Bible says that fire, earthquakes and floods will signal the end of the world. Some would argue that recent natural disasters may mean this vision may not be far off. We’ve seen natural disasters all over the world. Japan, for example, had a huge earthquake killing over 15,000 people. The problem with this argument is in 1771 Japan had an earthquake just as severe, and it clearly did not stop time.
All of this “end of the world” talk is hard to believe. Bottom line, no one really knows what next December 21 will bring. So, when the dreaded date rolls around, I will be sitting on the couch drinking hot chocolate and watching “A Christmas Story.” What about you?
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