Do you remember that this world was supposed to come to an end on Friday, December 21, 2012? Yes, a big noise was made about this in the months, and even the years, before that date. And even though December 21, 2012 passed like all other days, the belief that the world will soon suddenly end has remained strong.
And believe me, a whole lot of people are still preparing for it in very many countries. And such people are taking countless ingenious and creative steps to ensure that they and their families would survive when the end suddenly comes. The Noah of the time of the Biblical flood received instruction from God about how he and his family should survive. The would-be Noahs of today are adopting countless survival measures, based on the enormous store of mankind’s knowledge of technology. Being a historian by training and profession, I am attracted to watching what these folks were doing – mostly in the technologically most advanced countries of the world. Altogether, it is an awesome spectacle of man at his smartest, his most technologically savvy, his most foolish, and his most funny.
The Noah of the Bible received his fore-warning from God that the world in which he was living was about to be destroyed. So, where did our own folks in today’s world get their fore-warnings from? From an endless number of sources. Many who are Christians claim that they got their warnings from God – from some special reading of some books of the Bible. Of such Bible books, the most popular with these folks is the last book in the Bible – the book of Revelation. Very many claim that from reading the book of Revelation, plus of course other Bible books like Daniel and Ezekiel, they have come to the very certain knowledge that the sudden end of the world is just around the corner.
But other powerful warnings of theirs come, not from the Bible, but from certain prophecies in more recent human history. Of these, the most authoritative, according to the Doomsday believers, is the calendar created hundreds of years ago by the Mayan civilization which existed in Central America, and which became extinct at about the beginning of modern times. The evidence available to us show that the Mayan civilization was very sophisticated in many things – especially in architecture, astronomy, astrology, and the reading of the stars. For many years now, archaeologists and anthropologists have told the world that the Mayan calendar is so highly sophisticated that it contains correct records and predictions of stellar happenings dating all the way back to 23,000 BC. They have also told the world that this mysterious Mayan calendar stopped abruptly on December 21, 2012, the day of the Winter Solstice when the Sun annually stands at its lowest altitude above the Earth. From this, many people conclude that the Mayan calendar includes the prediction that the world would come to an abrupt end on December 21, 2012, or soon after that.
Human imagination quickly added a flood of other “prophecies”. An ancient North America people called the Hopi had a tradition which said that five words would be created in succession and that as each perished its successor would appear; that each would exist for millions of years and then perish, for its successor to appear. This Hopi tradition claimed that four worlds have come and perished, and that the fifth world, which would be the last world, is our present world which has been in existence for many millions of years and which is now due to perish. Believers in the Doomsday prophecies quickly added this Hopi tradition to their picture – as proof that the world is about to disappear.
But there are many other prophecies – written prophecies attributed to known authors in our modern world. The greatest of these modern prophets is Nostradamus, a Frenchman who lived in the early 16th century. Nostradamus wrote down his prophecies, and today we have books of his prophecies in libraries across the world. Those who have studied his prophecies say that he clearly prophesied the coming of Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, the First and Second World Wars, the assassination of President John Kennedy, and many other events in our modern world. They also say that he prophesied that the world would end through a number of cataclysmic events – such as worldwide earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, enormous wars, and fires falling from the sky. He is said to have identified Napoleon and Hitler as the first and second Antichrists spoken of in the book of Revelation; and to have prophesied the coming of the third and last Antichrist not long after Hitler.
Not surprisingly, the Doomsday people developed very fascinating scenarios of how the world would end. Their most interesting end-point scenario is that a large piece of blazing rock – an asteroid – from space would hit the earth. According to their fascinating calculations, an asteroid measuring about one mile by one mile by one mile, if it hit the earth, is sure to hit with 10,000 times the destructive power of the greatest atomic bomb that man has ever produced. Under the impact of such a devastating force, the earth would be so massively disrupted as to bring all life on the earth to an end. Its immediate impact would destroy all houses on the earth, and incinerate most of the earth’s surface. A thick cloud of dust and smoke would envelope the earth for many years, radically changing the earth’s climate. If there were human survivors, they would be very few and scattered, and they would find themselves in a world from which all signs of human civilization has disappeared. They would have to start all over to create the basic elements of human civilization.
And so there arose the people who call themselves Doomsday Preppers – that is, humans who are determined that if they survive, they would have some basic things with which to keep their lives going, and with which to start civilization all over again. Believe me, these people are not kidding; they are very serious. Their preparations include many carefully thought-out measures. To be sure that if they survived they would have food and water to continue to live on until they could produce some crops, they have created underground food dumps in various locations and taught their families how to find the dumps. They included seeds in the dumps, as well as simple hand tools for scratching the earth and planting seeds. They calculated that other survivors who had no preparation and therefore no food or water might become desperate and begin to attack those who had such supplies. Therefore, a major part of each Doomsday Prepper’s preparation is to buy guns and teach his family how to use them. Many Preppers have built underground bunkers, or otherwise specially fortified homes, where they and their families would be able to live in safety until life becomes safer. Some groups have even formed companies or clubs to build large underground bunkers where small communities of survivors could live.
Perhaps the greatest thing which demonstrates the mighty seriousness of Doomsday Prepping is an international seed dump built in the far north of Norway. Here, the inside of a mountain has been dug out to create a large frozen warehouse where millions of carefully preserved seeds from all over the world have been stored. Similar but smaller versions of this have been built in some other countries. The idea is that if Doomsday does come and everything on the earth is incinerated, the few humans who survive may find ways to take advantage of the seeds hidden in these secret warehouses.
Well, we may laugh at these things. But, on second thoughts, we cannot but pay respect to man’s ingenuity, and man’s thoughtfulness about his future. Also, we cannot but wonder why we Nigerians – indeed why we members of the Black race in Africa – seem so unconcerned about our collective future, why we never seem to be able to make orderly preparations for our future, and why the prominent ones among us are invariably obsessed only with grabbing all power and all resources for themselves – without any concern for the group’s future? For instance, when we Nigerians came into possession of enormous revenues from petroleum, side by side with widespread predictions that petroleum was likely soon to fade out of the world economy, why did our leaders not use the revenues to prepare for our future in a serious, orderly and sustained manner? Why is such a disaster as this replicated in virtually all Black African countries? What is wrong with us as a race? Who, ultimately, are we?
NATION
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