Darrell Laurant: Living lights out in 2012

Oh, right — 2012. Isn’t this the year a lot of people say the world is going to end?

You’d think the more superstitious among these doomsayers would have opted for 2013, perhaps on a Friday the 13th. But rumor has it that due to an assortment of planetary alignments (all of which have happened before, by the way), the curtain will fall in December. Others point to the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2011 as a dire omen.

Maybe they just ran out of stone tablets, or parchment, or whatever they wrote their calendars on. For that matter, if the Mayans were so smart, why didn’t they invent firearms before the Spaniards? If they had, they might have conquered the whole South American continent.

The particulars of this supposed earthly demise in 2012 are a bit hazy, also. As a journalist, I want specifics. Will we take a sudden right turn toward the sun and be grilled? Collide with a giant asteroid?

Moreover, we’ve heard all this before. Televangelist Harold Camping called the end date wrong twice last year. And remember 1999, when the fact that computers became confused on Jan. 1, 2000 was supposed to cause airplanes to fall out of the sky?

The supermarket tabloid “Weekly World News” has been predicting Armageddon for as long as I’ve been buying groceries. Usually Nostrodamus emerges as their primary source, but being dead, he’s not available to explain why those grim forecasts always fizzle out..

My wife, a very wise person whose opinion I respect, believes that 2012 will ring in some transformative and beneficial changes for humanity.

Wouldn’t that be nice? To paraphrase John Lennon, imagine if we could all just stop fighting. Or what if the practitioners of all the world’s religions could start truly following their own precepts and stop harassing everyone else who believes differently?

As an incurable optimist, though, I see some positives even in a “lights out” event in 2012.

The City of Lynchburg wouldn’t have to finish its CSO project.

Politicians would have term limits for real.

If the Green Bay Packers (my team) win the 2012 Super Bowl and the world ends, they would reign as the eternal NFL champions.

The mortgage would be burned on our house (along with everything else).

We could take all of those credit cards that banks send in hopes of entrapping us, max them all out, and await The End in Tahiti.

When you think about it, the end of the world would be a cruel cosmic joke on the media — the biggest story in history, and no one around to tell about it.

Me, I’m not holding my breath. And I’m hoping my wife is right.