Mayan Predictions for 2012, German Analysis and a Little Village in France

Not long ago I was in a little village in southwest France where new age doomsayers were gathering on a mountaintop they believe will be saved when the world ends in 2012.

They believe the world will end in 2012 because of now-famous glyphs on the ancient Mayan calendar said to herald the end of this age.

But there may be a glitch in the glyph: German experts in Mayan doodle-work now tell us that though an age may indeed be ending, the world will absolutely not. Everyone who thought the lights would go out on the next winter Solstice must now unpack their astral suitcases, go home, repaint their houses, figure out how to talk to their kids, look for jobs.

The world is not ending. For a small few the news is no doubt disappointing. It’s more complicated to continue on, on this loony bin of a planet. No doubt there’ll be some resentment toward the ancient Mayans for getting our hopes up. Even though, for all we know, the after-life could be decidedly worse than what we’ve cooked up here.

It’s not the Mayans’ fault that we misread their runes. That we penciled in our escapist desires on their pin-up calendar. They had every right to construct ages and eras out of the infinite spinning of the stars. We do the same thing. Our latest millennium even ended with a misinterpretation of its own: Y2K. When computers were supposed to stop computing.

It may be that we owe the Mayans an apology. Who are we to think we can dodge the thorny issues of our time by just going up in easy smoke in some wintery apocalypse? We are going to wake up on December 22, 2012 to the same problems that will hound us when we go to bed the night before: poverty, injustice, war, famine, and environmental degradation. Much of it stirred up in the fear-shackled minds of men.

Just as we’ll all wake up this Sunday, New Year’s Day, 2012. As a species, we’ll be steering this ship for a while longer yet. How long depends on our courage to face our shared problems… rather than kicking them down the road for the next generation. If we pass the buck I’m afraid we won’t go out with a big, easy Mayan bang, but via a slow, torturous process of self-annihilation…involving a scarcity of food and water for growing populations, the spread of war, a total breakdown in civility. If we let things come to that, we’ll look back on next year’s Mayan opt-out with nostalgia, and even longing.

There is cause for hope in the ancient Mayan prediction, though. It says that all systems based on fear will be transformed. If that’s true, if someone were to really pull that one off, then the Problem behind all of our problems would dissolve away.  Then, a new age truly would be beginning.