All of the chatter around the Mayan 2012 phenomenon inevitably gives rise to comparisons with Y2K, the computer bug that was widely predicted to have catastrophic effects when the world's computers ticked over at midnight on December 31, 1999.
Of course, as in all such comparisons, there are both similarities and differences. But 2012 skeptics will most likely gleefully jump on the comparison to point out that nothing much happened then, so, ipso facto, nothing much will occur on December 21, 2012....... and they might be right......or not.
I must confess that I myself bought into the whole Y2K thing hook, line and sinker back then. Starting in mid-1998 my entire life, both personally and professionally, seemed to revolve around Y2K (just ask my friends and family!). After first learning about the impending problem, and having a propensity for doomsday thinking anyway, I quickly immersed myself in the subject and became a self-made Y2K preparedness consultant. It became my full-time occupation. Not that I made much money at it. Hardly. Certainly not enough to feed my family. But I am a man of causes and Y2K became my cause.
I gave day-long workshops on Y2K preparedness (not a bad thing in the earthquake-prone Bay Area), wrote articles for local publications, advised individuals and small business owners, gave presentations to various community groups, read everything I could get my hands on, and regularly compared notes with other Y2K activists, both locally and nationally, often staying up on-line until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.
I secured a small grant from The Center for Y2K and Society and served as the staff member for a local community group, Richmond Neighborhood Y2K Resource Center. I was also commissioned to develop an on-line resource guide, Y2K Kit for Individuals and Communities, for the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
I shlepped my family to the local Mormon canning center to fill numerous #10 cans with dried food, bought and filled a 50 gallon water barrel, stocked up on all sorts of survival supplies, and put in a small cache of silver coins. While I never professed to know what was going to happen, I was certainly thinking about, worrying over, and preparing for, the worst.
And, quite luckily for us all, the worst didn't happen. In fact, nothing much of anything happened, which was simultaneously a relief and an embarrassment (see the piece I wrote in early January, 2000 regarding my feelings about my Y2K experience).
Having steeped myself in so much doom and gloom for so long and so needlessly, I am loathe to go there again now, and that is perhaps the main point of this post. While predictions of disaster are rife for 2012, it is just not a place I want to spend much time.
Been there, done that.
Although a variety of knowledgeable people have postulated a large number of cogent reasons why we should be deeply concerned about what the next year holds, personally, I prefer to accentuate the positive.
Maybe one of the main differences between Y2K and 2012 is the fact that there is a potentially positive aspect to 2012. The only positive thing that could be predicted for Y2K was the mind boggling growth in IT budgets and the exorbitant amounts of overtime garnered by computer programmers worldwide (one undocumented estimate places the cost at half a trillion dollars).
In contrast, there is a whole phalanx of positive material prompted by 2012. Some observers see it as the advent of a Golden Age for earth, the time of the return of our benevolent space brothers, an unparallelled opportunity for a global Ascension in consciousness, a thinning of the veil between our nominal reality and "the other side," etc.
So, rightly or wrongly, that is where I am increasingly going to place my emphasis in this blog in the coming year.
That's not to say that I will be shunning preparedness issues altogether. To my way of thinking, preparedness is always a good thing. Just look at what has transpired in the past year: the earthquakes in Haiti, Turkey, and Peru; the flooding in Thailand, Australia and Pakistan; the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan; and the tornado swarm and Hurricane Irene here in the U.S. So, if there is even a slight possibility that there might be an uptick in such natural disasters in the coming year, preparedness just makes good common sense.
Granted, there was a lot of hype involved in the Y2K discussions -- regretfully I contributed to it a bit myself. However, it wasn't all hype by any stretch of imagination.
For example, as TLomon posted on Above Top Secret several years ago, "Y2k was a real issue. A real problem...." and the reason that all of those nasty predictions didn't come true was because "...people like myself worked for YEARS cleaning up the mess....A lot of people working a lot of hours made sure that systems stayed up and running during that switchover." (See http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread342367/pg1#pid4125968 for a fuller discussion.)
His take on the situation is very close to that of other programmers. For example, a friend in Oregon wrote me a while back saying,
I'm recalling my neighbor's story about Y2K ... she said that she hates it when people say that Y2K was a hoax because nothing bad actually happened. She was one of the computer specialists who was working for years to fix all of the problems. It is because they took it seriously and painstakingly made all of the corrections that the catastrophes didn't happen on January 1st.
So, will December 21, 2012 turn out to be a non-event as in Y2K,
or will it be the biggest thing to ever happen to the human race?
I guess we don't have to wait too long before finding out.
