The world is supposed to end this week, at least according to some poorly researched interpretations of the Mayan calendar. It seems the world is supposed to end frequently these days, because of computer malfunction, alien invasion, Biblical prophesy, or the Mayans, a people we don’t take very seriously except for their possible connection to doomsday.
Even NASA has gotten into the discussion, issuing a statement and accompanying video (called ‘Why the world didn’t end yesterday’) explaining how the Mayan calendar actually works, and including such reassurances as, ‘neither is a rogue planet coming to destroy us’ and ‘If there were anything out there like a planet headed for Earth, it would already be one of the brightest objects in the sky. Everybody on Earth could see it. You don’t need to ask the government. Just go out and look. It’s not there.’
I often wonder why we incessantly tell these stories about the end of the world, our seeming need for a crisis of that magnitude—particularly in how we tend to conceive of it: angry (alien) or indifferent (asteroid) outside forces doing us in. Last week, a mass shooting which left 27 people dead, 20 of them children. Isn’t this an end of the world? American drone ‘double tap’ attacks targeting first responders —isn’t this an end of the world? The multitude of ways in which we harm one another through physical and emotional harm—isn’t each an end of the world? Overpopulation, unequal distribution of food and water, global warming: each its own end of the world. And these ends come from us, not from mythic stories or cosmic forces. They come from humans deciding the world as we know it isn’t worth saving.
Jack Gilbert writes, ‘I believe Icarus was not falling as he fell,/but just coming to the end of his triumph.’ Maybe that’s where we are right now, coming to the end of our human triumph. Unable to see our triumph as we spiral out of control. Unable to have the hard conversations necessary to keep ourselves flying. Unable to remember, as Terry Tempest Williams writes, ‘that the world is meant to be celebrated.’ Maybe it’s easier to obsess over poorly interpreted Mayan predictions instead of examining the hard truths of our lives: that so far, at least, we end in human fire, human blood, human tears.
Posted with Blogsy
Planet of the Blind 