How many "End of the worlds" have you lived though? I've made it though nine

[MrScorpio]

1. Oct 1962 - The Cuban Missile Crisis

2. Nov 1963 - JFK Assassination (I read somewhere once that we were planning to go nuclear against whatever country that might had been behind it)

3. 1968 - The whole year

4. 1975 - Vietnam unites (The idea was that SE Asia was going to fall like dominoes to the Communists. Never happened)

5. 1981-1989 Two Reagan terms (You have no idea how many scares we had)

6. 1991 - First Gulf War (Had Iraq put chemicals in those SCUDs they dropped on Israel, Israel would have responded with nukes)

7. 1 Jan 2000 - (Y2K Bug Armageddon)

8. 9/11 (Well, that was kind of the end off the rule of law. Which is almost like the end of the world)

9. 2008 Financial Meltdown (Imagine if Bush had followed his "Free Market" instincts and sat on his fat ass and done nothing)

10. 2012 - ???????

[EFerrari]

1. Wasn't Rome going to take over the United States in 1960?

That's a good list. I never thought about it that way.

[merh]

21. you mean they didn't?

All those years of catholic education wasted, mom & dad paid way too much for that tuition. x(























:rofl:

:hi: :hug:

[EFerrari]

24. LOL! Damn, we were THIS close, too.

:rofl:

:hi:

[MercutioATC]

2. By your count, I've lived through eight...

...and you've only really made it through nine.

The world COULD end in 2012 ;)

[MrScorpio]

3. Duh

Thanks

[MercutioATC]

7. NP. If the world doesn't actually end in 2012, we can all claim another

:)

[AllentownJake]

4. Well by definition you've lived through them

One day, you won't. My Dad's world ended on Ground Hog day in 2007. The rest of the world went on, but I'm pretty sure, he isn't around anymore.

As for the death of all humanity, eventually it will have to happen. Whether it happens now or 3 billion years from now, eventually humanity will die or evolve into something that is no longer humanity and even when humanity breathes it's final breath, I'm sure life will exist, probably even self aware life, and I'm sure somewhere in this universe stars are being created and dying as we speculate.

Just the nature of the universe.

[Uncle Joe]

29. I agree with your point of view. n/t

[lunatica]

5. This thread was too good to pass up

[lxlxlxl]

6. 1 is enough

i was thinking about this the other day...we are either blessed or cursed to be living at a turn of the millenium. the years running up to 2000 were filled with so much b.s. about end of the world stuff, and it hasnt gone away. i know for certain that all of this stuff has bigger picture effects on how people think about their lives and politics, and used to blame the bush wins on the 'end of the world' mentality...

[JuniperLea]

8. I'm going to avoid that last one altogether!

I will not be seeing that movie! I read a movie review, and shame on me for forgetting the reviewer because this made me LOL, and the reviewer said the Mayan calendar was actually warning us about his movie.

We must be close to the same age, MrScorpio... I survived those too... and whilst growing up in a household with a staunch Republican father and a tree-hugging liberal mother... Dad came around a couple of years ago. Voted for Obama and everything:)

[Cerridwen]

9. I survived all those. Not everyone was as fortunate.

I guess it depends on whether you're waiting for a planetary explosion or whether the small world-ending occurrences are as devastating to those involved as an "end of the world" crisis.

Yeah, I guess my world view is a bit skewed.

I was 5 - 1. Oct 1962 - The Cuban Missile Crisis

JFK didn't live through it. But, hey, I survived. - 2. Nov 1963 - JFK Assassination (I read somewhere once that we were planned to go nuclear against whatever country that might had been behind it)

MLK and RFK died, but hey, I survived. - 3. 1968 - The whole year

Number of dead at "war's" end? Still being debated. I lived. - 4. 1975 - Vietnam unites (The was that SE Asia was going to fall like dominoes to the Communists. Never happened)

My cousin went in one of the first rounds of the "gay plague." I lived. - 5. 1981-1989 Two Reagan terms (You have no idea how many scares we had)

Number of deaths due to war? Number of lives ruined through health problems caused by war? Number of families destroyed? But, I survived. - 6. 1991 - First Gulf War (Had Iraq put chemicals in those SCUDs they dropped on Israel, Israel would have responded with nukes)

I was hoping this would bring the systems to their knees. Eh. But, I lived. - 7. 1 Jan 2000 - (Y2K Bug Armageddon)

You answered this. - 8. 9/11 (Well, that was kind of the end off the rule of law. Which is almost like the end of the world)

A lot of people are suffering and we won't know the tally of how many lives were and will be lost due to lack of access to the basics of life because of economic circumstances. For now, I'm alive. - 9. 2008 Financial Meltdown (Imagine if Bush had followed his "Free Market" instincts and sat on his fat ass and done nothing)

Yeah. Exactly. - 10. 2012 - ???????

[jobycom]

10. You left off the Ice Age of the 70s, plus a bunch of religious ones.

http://www.bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm

[cynatnite]

11. I thought you were talking about all the times some religious nut declared it...

I lost count at about 8...or maybe it was 9.

I wasn't born until 1965, but never thought any of those last five scenarios could end the world.

[immoderate]

12. What about when the planets line up?

And those gravitational forces pull the earth out of it's orbit? :scared:

--imm

[customerserviceguy]

13. I had a Jehovah's Witness friend

who had me convinced at the age of twelve (in 1969) that the world would end in 1972. After that, I stopped falling for eschatological shit. And that means from both the religious fundies, and those who do a "the sky is falling" act because of ecological concerns.

[MrScorpio]

16. The end is always nigh

Which is why I skipped all the religious refs

[eleny]

14. I'll add some gems from the 1940s & 1950s ...

-Duck and cover under the desks in elementary school
-The Asian Communists of the Korean War. I went to Catholic school, that's the way it went
-The start of the Cold War in the 1940s when Stalin was still alive and into the later decades - that bled into your life, for sure.

[L. Coyote]

32. I survived McCarthyism, and the election of Dick Nxon as V-P.

The Red Scare gave us gave us that Bozo as a national figure!

[PDJane]

15. The PRC was born in 1949.......

The same year as I was born. Israel was born a year earlier, in the Nakba. Apartheid becomes the official policy of South Africa.

1954: The first oral trials of the birth control pill begin. This was supposed to kill off the human race and lead to all kinds of ills. Six years later, it is approved by the FDA.

1958; Iraq's king Faisal is assassinated by the Army, Iraq becomes a republic, withdraws from the Baghdad Pact and allies itself with the Soviets.

1959: Cuba becomes a communist country, the first in the hemisphere.


1964: The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the excuse for Vietnam, happens. Israel starts diverting water to the Negev, which begins an environmental disaster that is ongoing. China and France detonate atomic bombs.

[robertpaulsen]

17. You forgot the Jupiter Effect - March 10, 1982

This fits within the Reagan terms you mentioned, but really has nothing to do with him:

Jupiter Effect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

The Jupiter Effect is a bestselling 1974 book by John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, which predicted that an alignment of the planets would create a number of catastrophes, including a great earthquake on the San Andreas Fault, on March 10, 1982.<1> The predicted catastrophes did not occur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Effect

Able Archer of 1983, on the other hand, was a definite near-end of the world scenario that Reagan had a lot to do with.

[phasma ex machina]

36. +1 you beat me to it. nt

[truedelphi]

18. You forgot the Harmonic Convergance -- Summer 1987.

Not sure it promised the end of the world or if it just promised a bunch of folks would get to gether in some gorgeous National Parks and spend lots of money in the nearby towns. Didn't fulfill the former, did fulfill the later.

[MrScorpio]

20. I just arrived in DC during that time

I was too busy getting laid

[Speck Tater]

19. All the above, plus there was some local nutcase in 1959 who said 1960 would be the end. nt

[merh]

22. All the ones you named plus a bunch others have names

and Katrina

Damn,thank dog I'm not a cat with only 9 lives. :scared:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

23. You forgot the one in early 1962

which was supposed to be the Antichrist appearing in India.

[MrScorpio]

25. I was like a few months old at the time, yeah

But given that, I skipped all the religious ones

[EFerrari]

26. You know, growing up with "duck and cover" should count

as one long, end of the world kinda thing. The Cold War. I still can't believe those miserable dicks scared us to death for years about death from the sky.

[MrScorpio]

27. I remember once that we were all hearded into our elementary school bomb shelter

Why, I have no idea

[EFerrari]

38. We never went to a bomb shelter. We just went out into the hallway

of our WW2 era portable classrooms that used to be an army base.

Because standing in the hallway of an army base is auto protection from Commie nukes.

:rofl:

[medeak]

28. relative gave away belongings 1899

as in cult that believed it was end of world in 1900. He had a thriving store and lived life in poverty. When 2000 came we laughed at all the hysteria.

[GliderGuider]

30. The 2012 Meme

Here's a little article I wrote about this recently.

The 2012 Meme

A lot of people are starting to feel portents of doom centering around the mysterious goings-on in the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012. Both positive and negative beliefs about the significance of the date are spreading very rapidly through our globalized culture. Positive beliefs include the New Age interpretation that our planet and its people may experience a physical or spiritual transformation, and that 2012 may mark the beginning of a new era. On the negative side, some believe that the 2012 date marks the beginning of an apocalypse. Both camps are spreading their ideas through numerous books, TV documentaries, websites and discussion groups. There is now even a feature film about the topic. Much has also been written about what the apperance of these beliefs says about the vulnerabilites of the human psyche.

While I don't have any particular attachment to the number or year 2012, I'm still fascinated by the symbolic power it has acquired. What follows is my psychological assessment of what's going on.

"End of the World" or millenarian ideas usually have two components: a real underlying issue (that may or may not be consciously recognized) and a focusing symbol of some kind. The millenarian meme reaches full power when there is a threat that is real but only dimly perceived by most, and a symbol that has both logical and supernatural aspects. The logical aspect makes the symbol acceptable to our rational minds, and a religious or spiritual context always amplifies the power of symbols.

There have been two recent examples of "doomsday fever" that can help illuminate what's going on with 2012.

The nuclear holocaust fears around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis were founded on the real fear of a first strike triggering a global thermonuclear war. The focusing symbol was Communism, a quasi-religious system that was poorly understood in the west and was imbued with a Manichean aspect of pure evil.

The Y2K panic was founded on a real fear of widespread computer malfunctions in critical systems. The symbol was of course the year "00", which had both a logical component (we were all told how you couldn't get 4 numbers into a computer memory designed to hold only two), amplified by a deeply non-rational belief in the power of numbers, i.e. numerology.

The thing that prevented either of these psychic outbreaks from reaching full potential was the lack of an overt religious or spiritual connection to their driving symbols. Their power in the unconscious mind was mainly secular.

With this in mind, here's how I see the 2012 fever:

The real underlying threat driving this outbreak is the accelerating pace of ecological breakdown and climate change, the increasing instability of the world's economic system, rising cultural/religious tensions and the predictions of imminent Peak Oil and its potential impact on modern civilization. Most of the dire predictions of a near term peak in the global oil supply seem to cluster around 2012, the global economic collapse seems set to happen over the same time frame, predictions of global disruptions due to climate change are getting worse and the timing of their effects is drawing closer with every new report. Whether or not any of these effects actually manifest in the next two or three years, they all appear to have that potential and to be converging on that point in time. In the game of social frenzy, appearances are everything.

So those are the "real" factors contributing to our sense of unease. In the face of that, it's easy to see why the year 2012 has acquired such symbolic power. The timing is exactly right, there is a logical component to the symbol (the Mayan calendar is real) and it has a deep spiritual aspect as well. The end of the time cycle that is apparently tracked by the real calendar resonates deeply with ideas of "transformation through crisis" that are at the core of all mystical traditions.

These ideas are now entering the collective consciousness through various media, so even if people try to deny the accelerating physical changes in the world they are being subliminally shifted towards this awareness. The "2012 meme" fits into this situation perfectly, since it's in the right time frame and speaks to a great turning into a new, utterly unpredictable state. It has enormous psychic power as a result. Even if one discounted the spiritual dimension of the 2012 idea, it was inevitable that it would become an archetypal vision in this time of upheaval.

One other thing that's happening is that more and more people who recognize the possibility of an imminent collapse of modern civilization are responding with a turn to the spiritual. If hope cannot be found in physical or psychological materialism, it is always available in the spiritual dimension. We simply re-frame the problem so that a solution can be found. With its inherent spiritual component, the vision of a "2012 shift" is a natural component of this response.

It's going to be fascinating to watch this psychic fever build. I suspect it's going to be a lot more powerful than anything in recent history.

[dysfunctional press]

34. survivalist supply business.

that's the ticket.

[L. Coyote]

37. Will the Maya Long Count become an accepted calendar?

Time for some cultural changes?

A new age did not dawn with Bush in 2000, that's for sure! :rofl:

[robertpaulsen]

42. Bookmarking your site.

Thanks for that, Paul. I always appreciated your input on the now defunct Peak Oil Forum here.

Have you seen Collapse yet? I know it was a big hit at the Toronto Film Festival. It just came to L.A. on Friday and I was there opening day:

Tuesday, November 17, 2009
When Technology Fails, Don't Panic
A Movie Review of Collapse
http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2009/11/when-technology-fails-dont-panic.html

[GliderGuider]

43. Hi robert, thanks for that.

We did have a good time in that forum, didn't we?

I haven't seen Collapse yet - that's a nice review you wrote. So many people are getting a whiff of the hundredth monkey right now, which of course ties straight back to the 2012 meme. On the general topic of shifting consciousness, I recommend Paul Hawken's book "Blessed Unrest" to everyone who shows signs of waking up. It catalyzed my shift from despair to "paradoxical optimism" very nicely.

At this point I've moved past worrying about the mechanics or probability of collapse. I've accepted collapse as a given, but as you say in your review, "the end of the paradigm is not a death sentence for humanity." In the face of that, each of us has to decide what our response should be. Mine has been to shake off half a century of paternal programming and start investigating my inner world, in the hopes of reconnecting with true self. Dying on the road to self-awareness seems a worthwhile goal.

Cheers,
Bodhi

[L. Coyote]

31. Actually, your continual thread of survival reaches back a billion years plus

But, 2012 will fry your arse :rofl:

[DU GrovelBot]

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[dixiegrrrrl]

35. Don't forget the world was "doomed" if ERA passed.

All those years we fought for the Equal Rights Amendment just so we could have ....Palin.
Arrrggg.
And of course the world will end if DADT is passed.

You and I are of the same age, btw, Mr. Scorpio. Hiding under those desks, being terrified by the Cuban thing, waiting for Russia to blow us up, waiting for Viet Nam to "topple" and the waves of 'dominos" to sweep over us.
Is it any wonder Valium has such high sales???

[Odin2005]

39. The Clinton Presidency, Y2K, Saddam's nonexistant WMDs.

[Norrin Radd]

40. Maybe you are part cat. Nine lives and all.

[Alcibiades]

41. I lost track at 37

Hal Lindsay has probably been the most famous prognosticator of the end times, but there is such an unfailing appetite for this sort of thing that these predictions are neverending.

Though it's on some freaky Christian site, this site below does a good job enumerating the dates of the predicted "end times."

http://www.bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm

The rest of the site is highly amusing as well, and looks to date from about 1990.