by David Spangler
A friend of mine who is a high school counselor told me recently that some of the children she worked with were worried about or even terrified by the prophecies surrounding December 21, 2012, the date the Long Cycle of the Mayan Calendar comes to an end. This is a sad state of affairs. There are enough frightening things in our world as it is without scaring our kids with images of hypothetical disasters, especially when even the native Mayans do not interpret the end of the Long Cycle (and the beginning of a new one) as an apocalyptic end of the world.
We’ve already just survived another such millenarian scare with the passing of May 21, 2011, when many were prophesying the coming of the Last Days. This was a specific prophecy I hadn’t heard of until just a couple of days before the apocalypse was supposed to occur. Talk about being out of the loop! But then I don’t pay much heed to apocalyptic prophecies. My inner mentor John used to say that prophecies focused your attention on a particular date or a specific event, leaving you oblivious to other potentially more important or challenging events that then blindside you.
This year is already a case in point. A great deal of attention in the form of books, videos, movies, articles, websites and like has gone into focusing on 2012 as a year of catastrophes, but as far as natural disasters go, already we’ve had an earthquake and tsunami in Japan of historic proportions which brought on a nuclear emergency, and in the United States, an historic outbreak of tornadoes in the American Southeast, historic levels of snow and rain, and massive flooding of the Mississippi. Plus in the political and social arena, there’s been the historic (note how I need to keep using this word to describe the unprecedented nature of the events occurring around us) rise of the “Arab Spring” and the accompanying unrest and regime changes going on in the Middle East. In all the buildup towards 2012, I don’t remember any psychic or prophet saying anything about 2011. This year got overlooked, and yet look around! It’s hardly an ordinary year, and it’s not even half over. Read More
