Fear Mongering 2012

A few days ago, I had a nice time chatting it up with a good friend of mine, whom we have lost touch for about a year now. Then our discussion turned onto the doom day predictions of the year 2012 and the Mayan calender. Yes, you all heard of this.  So here some highlights on how I think of this.

Now, I'm kinda nonchalant about it. Don't get me wrong here, I am not saying that going forward I think everything is going to be just peaches and cream, nor am I egging it on either. For the most part I would prefer a more sensible and realistic approach than all this fear mongering, mystical doom day scare tactics that's going on.

For starters no one knows the day or the hour. Period. Actually, come to think of it, it has been the end of time since the dawn of time, for every generation had it's doom sayers. Yet, the world kept spinning and life still went on.

As far as the Mayans and their calendar. I still say the same thing. No one actually knows for sure. Do you know how many times the calendar and/or time as being changed throughout history? I know for a fact the Ethiopian New Year falls on Sept. 11th or 12th, depends on the leap year (how ironic is that?) and I believe that they are in the year 2003 (only as one example). Why time has even being changed during our lifetimes, implicating the new daylight saving time. Technically, we really don't know what bloody time it is anymore, when you think about it. Wondering if the Mayans took that into consideration??

Now, the Christian doom sayers, based on the book of Revelation. I must say, I have read this particular book several times, I never got it's *the end of the world*. What it does say is the "end of things as we know it" and a "new heaven and earth" will immerge. It sounds more like a *revision* if anything.

As far as all these great catastrophes. There is nothing apocalyptic about it. Everyone, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, erupting volcano's are nothing new. I'm sure our ancestors had seen many too, however didn't have all this fancy, modern technology to report every quake and storm to millions of people on a daily bases either. Obviously many made it through these natural occurences because we are all still here. So even if something would say, pop-off tomorrow I have faith that mankind will pull through just as our ancestors did.

Flocks of birds falling out of the sky and schools of fish washed up on the shores. I still think there is a logical explaination for this. I beleive in some unbelievable stuff, however I usually rest that on the process of elimination and/or burden of proof before I start jumping to conclusions.

But in any event persay something would go down, I think what would make things truely worse is that people are not even prepared for a flood much less anything bigger than that. I even feel this going green right now and us being more aware of conserving energy is going to help prepare us for any kind of emergency that springs up.

I think the thing that would work against us is, fear. When people are in fear, the tendency is to panic and cannot make good decisions when push comes to shove. When people are fearful, they may just choose to ignore or deny what causes them to fear and this isn't benefical. Fear is not benefical.

I feel hope, optimism and some realism is needed here and a lot less of the fear mongering.