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Britt Combs: The End is nigh, say experts

2012 latest deadline for total destruction

By Britt Combs | The McDowell News

Published: February 18, 2009

It has come to my attention that the world will be ending soon. I have always suspected it. But the ancient Mayans have, it turns out, confirmed it. The world will end in 2012. I have this on the authority of the History Channel (why is the "History" Channel so obsessed with the future?) so there can be little doubt. National Geographic Channel, the Science Channel and others have chimed in, so the experts agree. As Al Gore says, the scientific consensus is absolute and the debate is over.
What's more, Hollywood has weighed in. A new movie, "2012," is set for release, a sort of sequel to "The Day After Tomorrow." Sure enough, 2012 is doomsday.
It's sad, because my little daughter will be not but 5 years old. We'll miss out on a lot of fun family stuff. My wife will still be young and beautiful and we'll never get to retire to Florida together. It'll be a gloomy, cheerless day when the comet strikes and our eyeballs melt away and we disintegrate in a cloud of radiation and dust. I am not looking forward to this at all. In fact, I was just starting to have fun.
Honestly, the market for doomsday is always hot, it seems. I am drawn to that sort of thing for some reason, and clearly lots of other folks are too. Of the two dominant political parties in America, nearly their entire memberships are banking on the end; one group expects nuclear holocaust in a holy war for Jerusalem, the other expects us all to drown under the rising seas of a warmed globe, all the while suffering the indignity of hippies shouting "We told you so, you capitalist dogs!"
I remember when I was 3, a neighbor kid told me the world would end in 2000, and I would die. I didn't cry or flip out, but I thought a lot about that for months – maybe years after he explained that to me. It kept me up nights, planning how to best use the time I had left.
Eventually, of course, you realize that it's not wise to plan your entire life and death around the sage wisdom of the fire-bug 4-year-old down the street, the same one who, when you cut your foot wide open one day, talked you into packing the wound with dirt and mud out of the driveway.
But there's always another end-of-time story ready for you to consume.
In the 1980s I went to plenty of revivals and tent meetings, the message of which was usually that the good-guy Israelis and the bad-guy Palestinians (and their buddies, Russia, China and the 10-headed beast known as the European Union) were going to get into it every day and we were all sure to die, except for 144,000 Israelis.
The world seems to consist primarily of two kinds of people; those who respond to the imminent end of the world by going on a rapacious rampage of gluttony, free love and rock 'n' roll, and those who quit their jobs and max out their credit cards as a gesture of faith.
Then there's that tiny minority who respond by watching shows about the end of the world on cable, this group including yours truly. I can't help it.
History had a show recently about how someone had found all these drawings Nostradamus drew and hid away and they predicted the World Trade Center collapse (one picture shows a medieval tower on fire – Wow!) and another, sure enough, said we'd never make it past 2012.
The ancient Mayan calendar, they say now, ends suddenly on or about Dec. 21, 2012. And the I Ching predicts our doom on about the same day, according to the History Channel. The Mayans were a bloodthirsty nation that derived their power from daily orgies of torture and human sacrifice. How these wise and gentle folk could possibly know the future, History did not speculate.
But they did add some interviews with scientists who say there'll be a mighty comet or asteroid or something passing us by at about that time. Of course, there's generally always some monstrous heavenly body passing us at any given moment. Still, odds are, one of these "near-earth objects" will eventually strike and kill us all. And if the Mayans and the I Ching and, History added, King Arthur's buddy, Merlin, of all people (I thought he was a fictitious character) all agree on 2012, then why not? 2012 it is.
Me, I'm already getting sentimental about it. I smell the flowers now. I have decided to go ahead and eat the 1,600 pounds of Ramen noodles I have left over from Y2K. Unfortunately, nine-year-old ramen noodles cause severe diarrhea, so when the end comes, I know what room I'll be in and exactly what I'll be doing. What an undignified way to go.

Reporter Britt Combs writes for The McDowell News so as to keep up the minimum payments on the credit cards he maxed out back in '88.