Today happens to be December 21st. Many of you may recall back in 2012 (that’s 7 years ago now) everyone was talking about this whole “Mayan Apocalypse” thing, as one of their calendars happened to end on that date. Well, it actually didn’t, as it was misinterpreted, and the Mayan calendar naturally had beginning and end periods to it by design so that was nothing abnormal. Still, some weirdos out there, the types who think everything is “the end of days” propped it up like something major and it kind of took off. From about 2010 on till December of 2012 it was the hot topic that everyone had some kind of say in.
That’s just one if a great many “apocalypses” that we’ve been through. A couple of years ago I wrote an article about yet another one, and at that time I said I’d lived through 42 of them according to this site. Today that number is 47.
It’s funny, honestly, to think back to it, or watch old “documentaries” going on and on about this stuff, but then that got me thinking.
People actually take this crap seriously. Seriously enough to buy media related to it. People make money off of treating these events as if they are a reality, and people fall for it.
I live in an area of the United States known as the “Bible Belt.” Heavily religious, to say the least. As I also happen to be a regular thrift store shopper, it’s inevitable that I will come across some crazy VHS tapes, or even DVD’s, relating to previous apocalypse scares, mainly Y2K.
Ah yes, Y2K. I could write an entire article about it, and intent to, but the fact was for a few years leading up to the year 2000 there was a paranoia that because of the way many computers handled dates, as two digits for the year rather than 4, when the year reached 2000 the systems would fail in unpredictable ways, possibly doing anything — deleting personal records such as bank savings, launching nuclear missiles, shutting down the power grid, who knows.
People stockpiled resources, built shelters, and waited for a whole lot of nothing to happen. 2000 came without any serious issues, and soon everyone forgot about this incident.
Still, people had made their money. It wasn’t like you could return those VHS tapes talking about it. You couldn’t get a refund on the 500 cans of beets you had stored in the cellar. No one apologized for making a big deal over it when they had no clue what was or wasn’t going on.
The same was true of the Mayan Apocalypse event in 2012. No one apologized. TV Stations didn’t issue retractions to shows they produced amounting to propaganda. Religious leaders too capitalized in many cases, and they too didn’t apologize. They saw it as a “warning” to people, and continued telling the same lies many of them always do to get money.
That too is much of what I see in thrift stores — religious tapes about the Apocalypse, usually related to the Year 2000 itself, rather than the “Y2K Bug” but still, people will buy that up left and right, because they are told it’s so real and so urgent.. and then nothing happens. Ever. Period.
Yet when you tell them about something as pressing as climate change — even just the possibility of such being an issue, they deny it. People reject it fully, even when there is actual evidence to back up the statements.
How is it that people will believe someone telling them just because a calendar ends at some random day that the end of the world will come they will believe it, yet weather patterns which can actually be measured and shown to be getting worse and posing a risk to our very ability to live is ignored, or decried as “fake news” and treated as “debunked” when just a single thing doesn’t add up to what they think the topic actually is.
At this point it isn’t even about the liars making money — that’s bad enough, basically scamming the elderly or gullible out of their hard earned income for them to buy “bonus buckets” of Armageddon survival food, but the fact that these people go out of their way to brainwash their followers into rejecting demonstrable reality!
It honestly terrifies me that this happens. That people can believe something with no evidence behind it so readily, yet will simultaneously reject actual provable possibilities.
I’m sorry, that got kind of dark but in what I intended as a light laugh at the whole Mayan Apocalypse thing, I realized something much worse and couldn’t stop writing.
I’ll just leave this here, as I did in the previous article on this subject. Take it for what you will… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events