I’m well overdue to change the Daily Grail poll to a new topic – as I write, there have been 2777 votes on what 2012 will bring, with the majority of respondents saying ‘nothing’. But before we move on, here’s a recent CNN article on the topic which you might like to check out:
“There’s going to be a whole generation of people who, when they think of the Maya, think of 2012, and to me that’s just criminal,” said David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
“There is no serious scholar who puts any stock in the idea that the Maya said anything meaningful about 2012.”
But take the fact that December 21, 2012, coincides with the winter solstice, add claims the Maya picked the time period because it also marks an alignment of the sun with the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and you have the makings of an online sensation.
The article does a good job of talking to knowledgable, skeptical scholars such as Anthony Aveni (“I think that the popular books… about what the Maya say is going to happen are really fabricated on the basis of very little evidence”), as well as 2012 ‘celebrities’ such as John Major Jenkins (“The trendy doomsday people… should be treated for what they are: under-informed opportunists and alarmists who will move onto other things in 2013”).
But even if 2012 is just another year, you can always enjoy (?) seeing the world collapse via Roland Emmerich’s next disaster flick – 2012.
