It’s 2012 are you ready for the next doom and gloom?

Well it’s finally here, 2012.  In just a very short time it will be December, then the 21st.  In case you’ve been living under a rock, I speak of the much publicized and talked about Mayan calendar.  Specifically December 21, 2012, the end of their calendar.  Personally I think the calendar maker just got tired and figured that 60 generations was plenty of calendar for his kids, grand kids, great grand kids, great great grand kids, etc…

You see it over and over again, THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!  We’ll unless the Sun does something totally unexpected and goes red giant 2 billion years sooner than it should, the Earth isn’t ending for a very very long time.  I believe when people claim the end of the world they really just mean the realm of human existence.  The Earth was cruising along quite nicely without us and will do just fine without us, thank you very much.  So really when we talk about these things we’re really just talking about ourselves, our lives.  Going green and saving the planet for example, nope just hoping to make the planet a little better for ourselves, and perhaps a few of the other species on the planet.

So if the Earth isn’t ending on December 21st, 2012 then what’s the big deal?  When you were four and broke your favorite toy that was the end of your world, well for a few moments.  You had to deal with this major change in your life.  As we grow up and mature life makes us adjust time and time again.  We learn and move forward.  Not always, some people take longer or simply refuse to accept the change.  Drug and alcohol abuse, hell even online game addiction for example.

Change is happening all the time.  Most of the time it’s for the better, even if in the short term it hurts.  Capitalism is a very good model for change.  Businesses grow, diminish, survive or fail.  Another business steps in and fills that niche.  Sometimes surviving far longer than their predecessor.  That change affects many people and perhaps even you.  Recently the last two U.S. administrations have seen fit to step in and stop this process from happening.  Giving trillion (trillions right?) of dollars to corporations so they wouldn’t go out of business.  Personally I think this is one reason for our super anemic economic recovery.  Certainly if you lost your job during this most recent low, you and your family could be facing your own end of the world.  It isn’t of course, but boy it sure feels like it.  How will you survive?  Somehow mankind, and you, will find a way.

Even the Mayan calendar doesn’t predict the end of the world, merely and end to how things are and a beginning of how things will be.  Sometimes the change is so devastating it seems impossible that anything good could come out of it.  For example.  When the dinosaurs were roaming the planet for hundreds of millions of years and a series of events, volcanic, oh and that big rock the size of a mountain that crashed into the planet just South of the United States, well that was a change for them.  A pretty bad change.  But scientists theorize that this mass extinction of the dinosaurs is what allowed mammals to gain a foot hold on the evolutionary path to where we are now.   So even the end of the world for the dinosaurs wasn’t the end for all life on Earth.

This planet has been here for a very long time.  With all the turmoil in the solar system it’s not only amazing that our planet exists, it’s amazing we exist!  Change is inevitable.  It happens every day.  Some change affects us more some less.  On September 11, 2001 a change took place.  It affected the entire planet.  Well, people cared about it.  Some were happy some were sad, some like me, were pissed off.  But truth be told it didn’t affect most of us, not directly.  And even for those that lost loved ones in the initial strike of the twin towers in New York, friends, or acquaintances, it was just another change.  Life continued for the vast majority of the people on the planet.

So if December 21st, 2012 isn’t the end of the world, will there be change?  Absolutely!  People will die on that day.  Some will be married.  Some will go to jail, others will be involved in a automobile accident, and a four year old will drop and break a favorite toy.  But the world and mankind will continue.   Some of us will laugh and make fun of those people that took this date as some credible serious threat.  But down inside we’ll all breath a sigh of relief when the final time zone’s clock changes to December 22nd, 2012 12:00:01 AM.