I mean do you think that an antelope is worried that the Mayan calendar ended on 12/21/12? Probably not. An antelope is more worried about that cheetah stalking around the savannah.
Yet we as humans spent a whole year wondering if it was all going to come to an end. We have grand minds and rich imaginations but can we even comprehend what a worldwide apocalypse would look like? We see images of fire and blood and hear the cries of the innocent but we will never feel it with our bones.
There will never be a worldwide apocalypse but the ways of man have always been born to die. The Mayans had their day in the sun. There was a time when the sun never set on the Roman Empire. Both of those cultures experienced an apocalypse and their time ended then time moved on and there was the beginning of another culture.
There were souls in Aurora who went to see a movie one late night and they saw a glimpse of the apocalypse. It was not a worldwide event but when a man fired a gun at a crowd of people some of their worlds came to an end.
The children of New Haven Connecticut were far too young to see an apocalypse but that was not enough to save them. When an adult leaves home and never returns that is a tragedy. There is not a word that can capture the sadness wrought on the town of New Haven when the apocalypse hit their town. Every time a child is taken too soon I always wonder what amazing thing that child could have accomplished or created that the world is robbed of.
The violence of the world has permeated into so many other aspects of our lives. We watch football now knowing those men are too big and their safety is always at risk. We hear about the carnage that guns both create and protect us from. We feel the rough gestures of community when we slap hands then pound fists as a way to say hello and goodbye.
With 2012 behind us, it is fair to say that we no longer have a date of our end. It wasn't in 2000 and it wasn't in 2012 and even though I wrote a story about human looking aliens landing on Earth in 2018, it probably won't happen. No, we are the children of the new age and we have many problems to fix because this rock is gonna keep on rolling around the sun. We cannot stop it from happening so we need to find a way to improve our rock.
It is all we got people, this planet Earth, and it is stronger than all of us because it has the strength of all of us. Let us see what happens when we point that strength toward a bright future. Let us see how long it takes us to get there.
Let us make the violence we have wrought have purpose as it pushes us away from violence in the future.
