WHAT IF THE DOOMSDAY PREPPERS ARE RIGHT?

It was Thursday, 20 December 2012. It was evening and a few hours before midnight. Doomsday, as allegedly predicted by the Mayans, was slowly approaching.  According to a Reuters global poll, one in 10 of us was feeling anxiety about 21 December.  Despite many assurances that the Mayans never predicted the end of the world but a new beginning, everyone was just waiting to see if anything will happen.

Among many scientifically proven possibilities in which the world would end, there were a super volcano, asteroid accident, comet collision and suicidal supernova.  If anything was to happen that day, no one had an idea what it was going to be.

The Russian Minister of Emergency was forced to issue a denial that the world will not end. In a Village in the south of France, authorities barred access to a mountain where some believed an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) would come to rescue them.  Back home in my living room, the family was glued to the TV screen and our daughter was so scared she kept saying “My God” after every few minutes.  Her breathing was laboured.

However, some people just laughed it off. “It’s not going to happen because the bible says no one knows when the end will come.” Some websites were created specifically for Mayan Doomsday jokes. One website wrote, “with the Apocalypse upon us, everyone is making end-of-the-world jokes like there is no tomorrow. You might as well die laughing with our round of the funniest Mayan Doomsday memes, cartoons and Tweets”.

Social networks were abuzz with updates and comments. Most of these were on a lighter note. 

One thing that caught many people’s attention during this period was the National Geographic TV series, Doomsday Preppers.  Although these Preppers prepare themselves for urban jungle survival skills, food production skills,   an electrical grid failure, financial collapse, earthquakes, economic collapse, and maybe even a Zombie attack,  most of them even prepare for larger events like the earth colliding with an object from out of space or the shifting of the earth’s polarity. 

Watching these programmes made most of us start asking questions.  

“What if these guys are right?”

“Do they know something we don’t?”

“Is it possible to prepare for an unknown catastrophe?”

Well, 21 December came and passed without any event. The world as we know it was still there. There was no doomsday. It was not a surprise to many people but there may have been others who were disappointed that it never happened. There were some people who seriously believed that the world would end on that day and they left their jobs and families to spread the word. These surely must have been disappointed.

December 21, 2013 is not the only date that has gone into history as a day when Doomsday failed to happen. There have been other dates in history when earth was under the same “threat”.  In 1910 astronomers discovered that earth would pass through the tail of a comet. This created hysteria because some people believed a poisonous gas would penetrate the atmosphere and end life on earth.  This comet was Halley’s Comet.

In 1954, there was a woman named Dorothy Martin who started telling people that there was going to be an apocalyptic flooding on 21 December. Ironically, the date and month is the same as that of the 2013 doomsday prediction. This lady said she was receiving messages from aliens and that these same aliens were going to send a space craft to rescue believers from her cult.

In July 1999, the world was also supposed to end. This was according to Nostradamus’ prediction that a King of terror would come from the sky and destroy earth. Then there came the all too familiar Y2K.  It was believed that computers programmed with two-digit years rather than four would revert to 1900 rather than rolling to 2000 and that this programming error would trigger a nuclear war.  

We may have pulled through all these events with a laugh but does this mean nothing can ever happen to our planet? The way I see it, next time someone warns us of a pending doom, we shall not take it seriously and refer it to 21^st December, 2012. Doomsday Preppers believe something is coming.  They believe we have to prepare how to survive on a changed world.  What if they are right?

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