Today, many a media personality has been pointing out - with varying levels of deadpan irony - that we are still here. That small subset of Mayans who believed the world would end today were wrong. What a surprise.
This non-story about a story that we knew would not be a story might have you lamenting all the time wasted on this issue. But think of this: we're about to start 2013. Yes, a year with a famously unlucky number in it and I haven't heard a thing about it. The whole world's superstitious population has been successfully distracted by the end-of-the-world fear.
But what caught my attention today was the stories about the descendants of the ancient Mayans celebrating. Even though most Mayans didn't really expect an apocalypse, it was still the end of one of the cycles of their calendar; I suppose that's the equivalent of the turn of the millennium. To them it was a great moment of reflection and rebirth. It might have been nice if the rest of us could have participated in that celebration, but no, we advanced nations were too focused a prophecy of disaster that hardly anyone ever believed.
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