The End Is Near! Again!

The End Is Near! Again!

Nostradamus fans must be frantically searching his multitudinous prophecies in hopes of discovering irrefutable evidence that somewhere, somehow, he predicted Anno Domini May 21st, 2011 as the end, when the world will be absolutely kaput, when it’s all over, baby, and trying to reconcile ancient Mayan beliefs that the end isn’t due until A.D. December 21st, 2012.

Aficionados of The End of the World as We Know It have even coined an acronym, TEOTWAWKI, and established websites to prepare believers on how and when to pack up all their cares and woes beforehand. Now the “when” has been pinpointed, sort of, at least within the narrow spectrum of this coming Saturday and Friday, 12-21-2012, so all that remains is all the packing.

The primary proponent of the earlier date, retired 80 year old, N.Y.C. MTA train engineer Robert Fitzpatrick, has generously spent almost all his life savings of $140,000 for a thousand ads on N.Y.C. subways and bus shelters to alert the city of the impending Apocalypse.

No word, as yet, on how Mrs. Fitzpatrick, if there is one, regards her hubby’s retirement hobby. However, thousands, if not millions, of New Yorkers–as well as countless others–are taking his prognostications of a “Global Earthquake: The Greatest Ever” and the arrival of “Judgment Day” very seriously. That should dispel the foolish conventional wisdom that the Big Apple is inhabited by doubters and cynics and that people who agree with them are all nitwits.

Far be it from me to burst Fitz’s and other committed TEOTWAWKI bubbles but similar predictions have been bubbling around the doomed Earth’s globe for almost as long as there have been inhabitants of that globe. Remember Y2K?

Pre-dating that non-catastrophe, Sir Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal suggested the end was near in the seventeeth century and an Assyrian tablet circa 2800 B.C. bemoaned the end almost five millennia ago. As some solace for the fearful, let’s not forget Peanuts’ words of wisdom: “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.”

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, Newton, Pascal, the Assyrians, and probably a few million other doomsayers and their adherents were wrong and the world is still with us even if it is, as Wordsworth said, “too much with us.” One notable doomsaying prophet, Jim Jones of Jonestown fame, was right on the money but he accomplished the end of the world for only a select few in Jonestown in 1978 and then with spiked Kool-Aid.

On the other hand, filmmakers, ever on the moneymaking cusp, . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=4496)