The Year 2012: The End of the World as We Know It?

Listen to enough AM radio UFO type radio programs, and you'll start wondering if 2012 really is going to be the end of the world as we know it. The Mayans certainly thought it would be, or at least that's when their calendar - for all intents and purposes - ends. But really, what is it exactly that twenty twelvers are afraid is going to happen? Did the Mayans see something that we cannot, because we are somehow inferior to a race of mysterious people that have up and completely disappeared? Is the fact that we cannot seem to put a finger on what we're afraid of frightening in and of itself? The only thing we can really do is - instead of looking at the puzzle pieces and becoming frightened because there are a finite number of them - examine the pieces carefully enough to at least have a good go at finishing the puzzle and glancing at the big picture. I know it sounds more difficult than panicking and running away proclaiming doom and destruction, but really, it makes more sense. I promise.

After exploring the Internet in what was initially a very serious search for "2012 facts," I can only conclude that life on this planet, while sometimes prone to terribly childish maneuvers, is not going to end any time soon, unless we blow ourselves up. The "facts" that came up in my search for the truth about 2012 were based on numerological "certainties" (not science), coincidences (also not science), conjecture about planetary cycles (close, but nope, not science), bible code (not only not science, but not religion either), psychic predictions (oh my gosh, totally not science), and last but not least, some kind of unnameable fear that because the Mayan calendar ends between the twenty-first and twenty-third of December in the year of our Lord, 2012, that the world must end then as well. This last bit confuses me a little, because the calendar on my wall ends on December thirty-first of 2007. Should I be setting up a website proclaiming that the world will end when my calendar does? Does the World Wildlife Fund (the producers of my wall calendar) know something that I do not? Holy tamales, have we been focusing on the wrong calendar all along?