2012 Is the New Y2K

An acquaintance of mine started discussing politics with me on Christmas evening and for some reason, became obsessed with the idea that everything was going to Hades around 2012.

His reasoning? The end of the world -- or at the very least, the Final Conflict -- was originally scheduled for the year 2000 on old Christian calendars but unfortunately, Western society has changed its calendar several times since then, so that what was supposed to occur during the year 2000 in the first century A.D. was really meant to happen in the year 2012 on the modern calendar.

Is he right? I don't pretend to know.

However, after hearing doomsday predicted quite often during my four-and-a-half decades of existence, I can't help but be skeptical. And when you consider all the predictions of dire disaster we've heard in the last few decades -- the manifold predictions of World War III during the Cold War era, the Y2K scare, the prediction by scientists that the planets of this solar system would tear themselves apart in 1986, etc. -- it's a wonder that more people don't have a bad case of apprehension fatigue.

One can hear only so many warnings about the end of the world before one starts giving such warnings the same treatment received by Aesop's “The Boy Who Cried 'Wolf.'”

Armageddon may indeed occur within our lifetime. And to my acquaintance's credit, he didn't insist that I spend much time fretting about that possibility. Unlike some prophets of doom I can mention, he was not interested in selling me something or gaining my political support.

But he did insist that I take the possibility seriously.

So I will.

As seriously as the other prophecies I've just mentioned.

For in the end, we are all mortal, and it no doubt seems more flattering to some to believe that the whole world will perish when we die than to believe that the world will go on without us.

Better Armageddon, it would seem, than oblivion.