SEE YOU TOMORROW

Never before has a doomsday scenario caught the attention of ignorant bum, and brilliant world affairs analyst alike.

But the Mayans have trumped many before them such as Nostradamus, and had the attention of 21st century earthlings riveted to their calendar which for some strange reason abruptly ends, well, today.

That the end of a calendar is not the end of the world should have been very clear to the average Mayan, but not so to the Twitter-fed and Facebook educated planet-earth inhabitants of our day and age.

These folks are so used to the time-ended nature of everything, that they find it difficult to get used to the concept of eternity. Not that anything is eternal, and few would want to buck the Buddha's sage wisdom that everything is impermanent. But there are concepts of time and relativity that human minds cannot quite get around, which is probably why the Mayan calendar story has been of such mind boggling import to some of the most sane and rational people.

That these are not end-times would be obvious to most newspaper readers by tomorrow. But that does not mean that end-time calamities of the kind that have been described in the holy books have not come to pass, which is another reason earthlings find it almost reassuring to believe sometimes that these are indeed end-times!

The school shootings in the USA have been so incredibly mind numbing, but yet what is even more shocking is that despite serial happenings of this nature, the US cannot fight the gun lobby which insists on the free availability of firearms due to some ostensible fealty to the second amendment of the constitution, and the wish by the founding fathers that all citizens have the right to bear arms.

What was passable or even necessary in the frontier era is now a legislative embarrassment in America, but even so the gun lobby which is today driven by mercenary considerations is so powerful, that though Barack Obama cries copious tears literally at the news of a school shooting in Connecticut, he can in fact do nothing about preventing possible such occurrences in the future.

There are also the eternal end-time fears of nuclear holocaust fuelled by the anxiety that some careless trigger finger will one day blow up the earth in a massive mushroom cloud of madness.

But yet, despite all this end-time paranoia life is bound to go on, on planet earth as it has for millennia. The important thing is to ensure that there is no man made apocalypse. But then there are the unprecedented end-time like calamities such as the school shooting in Connecticut ...

It is not to say that holocausts have not occurred, or that there have not been horrendous crimes against humanity in the past. But yet, on any scale of horror, the Connecticut shootings are shocking because though little children were mowed down in cold blood, the US gun lobbies continue to be stubborn and unmoving, a calamity by itself.

More invisible calamities are the economic crimes carried out against average people. There is greed in unbridled capitalism, and none more significant than the avarice that was seen on Wall Street when the US economy was recently teetering on the brink.

This has more immediacy to us in our neck of the woods, than we may think. The repercussions of the US economic meltdown due to the vast and unbridled greed on Wall Street had reverberating repercussions the world over, and the poor in many countries still suffer from the effects of the financial gods causing hardships and deaths far and wide due to their actions which they knew will have knock-on effects worldwide.

As they say, these gods -- they can kill us for their sport. These are not end-times but certainly it's time we ended some of the reasons they often appear to a great many of us to be so.