You can hear the shrieks of laughter coming from the coffee shop here at the retirement home. People passing by on the street stopped and wondered what was going on. One of the residents read a headline from this morning’s newspaper; “Ancient Mayans forecast the end of the world this coming Friday!” and that’s what caused the outburst. The ancient Mayan calendar forecasts the end of the world on December 21st, 2012, or as it is written, 12/21/12.
The average age of the residents here is about 80, meaning that the average birth year was 1932. I must have had a curious look on my face when I heard the laughter. An old man crossed the floor towards me, poked me in the chest and said, “take a guess how many End-Of-The-World parties I’ve attended, sonny! It’s gonna take more than the Mayans to figure this one out! End of the world indeed! Where’s the bottle of whisky gone?”
And that’s how it’s been ever since Adam and Eve were misbehaving in the Garden of Eden. Every few years some nation or tribe or individual forecasts the end of the world and sets a panic tsunami in motion. It affects stock exchanges, put fear into the hearts of the superstitious and the uneducated and produces all kinds of undesirable results. Strange how ready we are to believe wild predictions.
Here in the retirement home we’ve been in this movie so many times we’re tired of it and now it’s just another comedy with a predictable ending (I hope).