There were a lot of you who sighed that sigh of relief on 21 December, when you realized that Mayans had got it wrong. You're not fooling me. I heard you.
OK, maybe it wasn't the Mayans, maybe it was just those fun-seekers who wanted the Mayans to be right. Don't get me wrong, it's not like we don't try often enough to 86 the planet; in fact, we're getting pretty good at it. No, there were just a lot of you who were glad that you were allowed to stay around for a little while longer. We should really ask ourselves, though, whether we really earned, that is, deserve, this additional chance.
One satirist characterized last year as the "Year of Living Stupidly", but I'm afraid that was the least satirical part of his piece. It was a year of damn near abject stupidity. Don't believe me? What about the legal spat between the US and Russia carried out on the backs of handicapped children? What about the civil war in Syria? Or, how about the saber-rattling going on in Israel? It looks like the Arab Spring got pretty wintry in Egypt, don't you think? Or, what about that star-spangled freakshow the Americans called a presidential election? How about throwing in a little mass murder (Newtown) or the ongoing violence against young people? And there was certainly no overreaction to Occupy protests and the like. No, worldwide, I think, we had plenty of opportunity to show how ill-suited we are for the title of "Crown of Creation".
I'm personally not sad to see 2012 fade from memory. It's getting ever more difficult to get through to anyone, and the amount of energy that one has to expend to simply get another's attention is getting to be burdensome. Everybody I run into seems to have a reason for anything and everything that's wrong, but not a one of them has stepped forward with a possible solution, primarily because the moment they step forward, everyone else starts shouting them down and telling them why that solution couldn't possibly work.
Sometimes I think we could simply call 2012 the "Year that Reason Died", because if there is anything that I miss more than anything else, it's reason in the public arena. It just doesn't seem to be in favor anymore. I have never experienced a year in which so many words were thrown at issues, problems and events, and which were heard by so few. Some folks don't want to hear, that's become clear, and some can't hear any longer, I suppose because the bleating of nonsense is just too hard to overcome.
Yeah, I'm having my moments when I sort of wish the Mayans would have been what they were hyped up to be. I would have liked to have seen a new world. Who knows how much longer this one is going to last?
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