The 2012 Apocalypse is Still Happening
if you were in your twenties in the bay area during the oughts then you believed in the prophecy of 2012. twenty twelve was the year when everything would change. everybody knew it. HOLD ON, let me be specific. not everyone believed. maybe not the tech bros down in silicon valley. but if you hung out in the hills at peace rallies, passing around joints, chanting down Babylon, listening to Goapele sing social justice hymns over crowds of swaying California dreamers, then there was a certain point of the night when the sun set over the Oakland hills and those rallies turned to drum circles around campfires. and that’s when the stories would start up about 2012. that’s when Salome would take the floor. dancing flames cast silhouettes across her face, and caused the gold stud in her nostril to shimmer, sparkle, shimmer, highlighting that divinely geometric nose shape that distinguishes women from the horn of Africa. she would point upwards to the sky full of stars and talk her shit:
“the age of aquarius is on the horizon my lovies. can’t you feel it in the air? haven’t you read up on the mayans and their prophesies? no?!! y’all gotta stop watching so much of that ‘breaking bad’ and ‘basketball wives’ and tune into what the ancients were talking about. you catch my drift? you know the mayans were meticulous astronomers baby. their estimation of the revolution of the moon was more on point than the great Ptolemy. that’s the genius of ‘la raza’ right there baby! during the classic period they created a calendar that put the spanish explorers to shame. how does the calendar work? you wanna know how it works?
well every 144,000 days is a cycle or a b’ak’tun. every b’ak’tun ends with a significant event. we living right now in the 13th b’ak’tun. it started on September 18, 1618. and if you remember sugar, 1618 was the year that those funky bohemians rose up against the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II who wanted to impose his religion on everyone. i swear everytime a b’ak’tun comes to an end it is either a revolution or a doomsday. the mayans always get it right.
every new b’ak’tun marks a transition, but the end of the 13th b’ak’tun is special baby. it’s the biggest to date. the end of the 13th marks the VERY END of the mayan calendar and the end of an age. that fateful day when the Great Cycle of the Long Count reaches its completion is quickly approaching us. that day is december 22, 2012. can’t you feel it lovies? or do you wanna live in Babylon forever with you HD tvs sipping Four Loko’s and eating your In & Out Burgers. the mayans say we gonna be free. free at last. free at last. almighty quetzalcoatl we’ll be free at last.”
there were two main interpretations of the mayan prophecy of 2012. the first was a doomsday scenario where the international community would precipitate into nuclear war or our corporate greed and unbridled consumption would finally result in climate catastrophe and mass extinctions. the second interpretation was that the transformation would be positive, the dopest dawning of a new level of human consciousness where we developed a deep awareness and compassion for our fellow human beings that resulted in world peace. me and my bohemian buddies weren’t quite sure whether 2012 would be inferno or paradiso, but all signs pointed to it being epic; the final round between good and evil when one side would deal the decisive blow.
you see, when I was 22 I thought of the battle between good and evil like a heavyweight fight between two power punchers. like if mike tyson ever fought george foreman. in those types of matches between knockout kings it’s inevitable for someone to go down in the first few rounds. it’s not quite clear which dude would fall in a match like this, but both guys hit so damn hard that the moment one of them gets a good hit in, the other one is hitting the mat. never to rise again. when we were 22, sitting around those drum circles, that’s how we thought about the fight between good and evil. we felt that in our lifetimes, somewhere in the near future, someone would deal the decisive blow.
i used to believe that the final round was near, and that apocalypse or revolution were right on the horizon. but over the past few years i’ve grown old. i’ve resigned to the fact that good and evil are more like two puny little welter-weight fighters with chins of steel. they swing at each other frantically but neither of them are strong enough to overpower the other. the fight goes on way too long. and the winner will be crowned by a controversial decision based on technicalities that most of us casual watchers don’t even understand.
the people demand a rematch. we want to see evil get knocked into next tuesday. but in the rematch the same thing goes down. again and again they fight, but by the fourth or fifth rematch, when these guys are old and washed up, after we’ve watched them tussle back and forth over the length of their careers, we still have no idea who is the better fighter. and perhaps we even forget which one is good and which is evil.
when I was 22 I thought that change was radical and happened through revolution; rapidly overthrowing systems of oppression. there was a clear side of good and if we could just get our side charged up enough, we would whoop the shit out of the axis of evil. everything in history had led up to this very moment when me and my fellow bohemians were gonna rise up and bring about the new era of human consciousness. we were gonna rage against the machine all the way up until December 22nd 2012; from books not bombs to occupy wall street.
december 23rd 2012 finally came. the day after the apocalypse was supposed to happen people all over the world were devastated. one of the leading preachers of 2012 doomsday had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars purchasing a bunker in Africa to prepare for the nuclear holocaust. looking like a complete idiot this preacher man had to face the media and his congregation and explain how his theories had changed a bit. i didn’t invest a fortune in the apocalypse but I had invested my hopes and dreams in Salome’s promise that we would be free at last. i felt like i had been deceived. like all the new age theories were nothing but a hoax. like all of our drum circles were not chanting down Babylon at all. there was a part of me that had believed a rapid change was possible and when December 22nd passed without an incident it was like a large portion of my faith in building a beloved community just passed away with it. i needed rent money and the revolution don’t pay no bills.
five years later, I am a cog in the machine. i work in a button factory, pushing buttons. ok, to be honest I don’t really work in a button factory. i work for a university educating some of the most promising minds of the next generation. but compared to a political protest, sometimes it feels like a button factory. slow and repetitive. in 2017 i am working fully under the assumption that the social issues that plague our society won’t change rapidly. the change I focus on today is the more painstaking gradual type. i have come to accept that change is messy, and that I will rarely get the visceral pleasure of knocking an evildoer the fuck out. i will never get to be George foreman. change requires me to show up everyday to work, or to boring meetings, and push the meter a little bit further towards progress. slowly creating an educational system that produces more knowledgeable and engaged citizenry.
i don’t really show up at all the political protests anymore. i converted to the church of science where we believe in the inevitability of gradual progress, through technology and innovation and building better institutions. have I sold out? every once and a while I hear what might be Salome’s voice in the back of my mind: “hey sugar. why are you spending 3 hours a day responding to email? none of this is gonna matter when the revolution comes. you will be more prepared learning how to make fire from striking stones together and how to load a rifle while running uphill. stay woke sweet tea.”
i have become better and better at silencing her voice, squashing it down in the recesses of my memory. that is until this November. the rise of Donald J. Trump has made me wonder if I abandoned this apocalyptic mindset a little too early. maybe my change in approach has made me fundamentally incapable of responding to the present political moment, a moment that might actually REQUIRE a bit of revolution. for the past 4 years I’ve been training for a long-term endurance fight when what we actually may need is a George Foreman sized social justice warrior to punch Donald Trump in his face.
is Donald Trump the catastrophic promise of 2012, just 4 years later than expected? is he a fomenting apocalypse that we must beat back with a drastic coup d’état? or is he simply a manifestation of something much more normal and endemic, a strain of xenophobia that is perhaps rooted in human nature and therefore needs to be addressed in a more systemic way? by each and everyone of us taking a look INSIDE. perhaps it is pure ahistorical paranoia to think that donald trump is any more racist than Andrew Jackson or Ronald Reagan. maybe there is nothing more apocalyptic about 2017 than there was about 1984 or 1965 or 1492. but isn’t this complacent attitude the same one that led to the rise of Hitler? i hate the complacency that has spread through my bones like a degenerating disease, paralyzing me in a constant state of nuance and indecision.
even with the hitler comparisons, it’s still hard for me to get back into the apocalyptic mindset. i’ve tried to pound rhythms on djembe drums and summon my revolutionary spirit back. I’ve tried to call Salome’s old cell phone number to see if she could remind me what it actually said in the popol vuh. what did the mayans mean by world ages coming to an end? i want to hear the urgency in her voice again to convince me that the hope I had felt at the beginning of this century were actually real. maybe just maybe I could bring it back.
but it’s like my mind has changed forever. it doesn’t do incantations. it does calculations. why is it so hard for me to march again? thousands of us are coming together all over the world to resist and I cannot leave my house. sometimes I look back and wonder, what if the apocalypse actually did happen on December 22nd? maybe the loss of my bright-eyed innocence was the apocalypse, a great plague infecting my spirit.
sweet heavens. that’s exactly it. our civilization collapsed right before our eyes and we didn’t even notice it. how did we sleep through the disaster that was twenty twelve? did we not see the signs? in february of that year a boy in a hoodie set out for the corner store to get skittles and tea and his coloured body was held down, pierced with slugs, torn from his spirit, and left lifeless on a suburban florida cul de sac. by may of that year we had lost the queens of three consecutive generations of black music: etta james the matriarch of r&b, donna summer the queen of disco, and whitney houston, known simply as “the voice.” just like that, 3 diva deities left the earth. in june, turmoil in Syria became a full out civil war in what has turned out to be one of the largest human catastrophes since World War II. there were signs.
Salome was right? i still cannot get in touch with her. she’s not the type to have a facebook account. i think maybe she is standing firm at standing rock or ministering to refugees in turkey. but the other night, after a long day at the button factory, i laid down and her spirit came gently to me.
“hey lovie. seems like you having a hard time. you listened to everything I said but it’s like it went in one ear and out the other. silly rabbit, revolution ain’t always rah-rah and Molotov cocktails and all that. and the path to the mountaintop ain’t never been no crystal stair. we all set our alarms to ring on December 22nd, but 2012 ain’t really about no date in time. and it damn sure ain’t about being SURE that change is coming. prophesy is imagination. it’s just imagining the future that could happen and being ready for change.
more than any of that, twenty twelve’s just about keeping your eyes wide open and payin attention to the signs. when you see the signs of doomsday dead in your face, you better scream like hell because you the only hope in preventing it. when you see the signs of utopia blossoming in your kinfolk you shine light on it and rejoice. that’s all it is.
and sunflower, let me tell you something about good and evil. good and evil ain’t boxing at all. the fight is more like capoeira. good and evil are two capoeiristas, swaying back and forth in a ginga.
they disciplined in the art of combat. they mastered all the acrobatic sweeps and kicks and strikes and are trained to attack precisely and decisively. so why when we watch ’em fight does it look like they’re playing games?
they look like they holding hands and guiding one another; like they dancing a sweet samba. why they striking one another with permission and adjusting to their enemy’s momentum like they trying NOT to harm him? one warrior spinnin under the outstretched kicks of another, right in the nick of time. is the fight rigged? sometimes I think this war we fighting in is completely absurd, sweet tea. i’ve thrown blow after blow and still haven’t wounded that son of a beast.
but maybe it’s not about kicking his head off. maybe it’s about bringing him so dangerously close that he can feel the rhythm of your movements and the thumping of your heart, all on beat with the strumming of the berimbau. bum bum, bum ba-la-lum, bum bum bum bum, bum ba-la-lum. if he gets close enough, he will feel you, he will adjust to your tempo and somewhere along the way harmonize with your humanity. this is how you win. at least that’s what the prophesy predicts…”
