(post title stolen shamelessly from Balloon Juice category name)
I culd easily rattle off on this topic for pages, but I’ll try to keep it short. Fuck 2012. I refer to the Apocalypse-porn movie. Its plot is based loosely on a bunch of bullshit about how because the ancient Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012, that THE WORLD IS GOING TO END nothing will happen. I hate the End Timers who celebrate this type of Doomsday porn. I hate that Sony might make a very nice profit from promoting fear, paranoia, and general irrationality. And it’s only 2009 now. Just wait until the actual date rolls around. I predict the needless bullshit it generates will be almost as bad as Y2K.
In order to make myself seem a little more rational about all this, I should probably give at least one reason why I feel this way. The Earth has been around for billions of years, and human-like creatures have been living on it for millions. And in all that time, the world has kept on ticking. But despite that, there is a very sizeable part of the population that is convinced that they will be the ones to see the world end. And worse yet is that many of them are actively hoping for it to happen. And even worse still is that many of those people are motivated by religious reasons. But for those of us who believe that there is no afterlife, I’d prefer to ride this life out as long as I can instead of praying for the destruction of billions of people.
One of the strange offshoots of gun culture is the survivalist culture. They’re not exactly pining for apocalypse, but rather for some disaster which will show all those unprepared people how stupid they are for not being ready at all times to grab your BOB (bug-out bag) and hike hundreds of miles away while using your weapons to keep thieves/bears/zombies at bay.
I mean, having clean bottled water and some food that requires no electricity or heat to prepare is responsible, particularly for those in hurricane country. But there are lots of companies that profit off of fearmongering to convince people that they’ll be dead if they don’t have ultra-strong lightweight parachute cord rolls and space-matches and enough food to feed a family for months on end.