On What Comes Next

   by Robert Jevne

   The one thing even my friends don’t know about me is that I am an optimist. And why would I, or anyone, keep that a secret? First, it’s a recent development and second, I’m afraid they will think I’m crazy, but at this point, I feel I have nothing left to lose and I am now ready to make the leap in order to get this thing going. So…here goes. I am very optimistic about our future. Our immediate future anyway. To be exact: about the next year. Let me explain. For those of you who don’t know - We’re all going to die. According to the Mayan calendar 2012 marks the end of well… the calendar. It completes a 5,125 year cycle which will culminate in some sort of astronomical alignment and subsequent cataclysm. And I couldn’t be more relieved. All this bickering has been driving me crazy, and I’m not just talking about the current political cycle. I’m talking about since our very origins. All this struggling against nature, against each other, and even against our own selves; the whole civilization process always has been and continues to be completely out of hand. You Pull yourself out of the mud, clean yourself up a bit, pound together some kind of shelter, hunt, gather, make nice with the neighbors, put on a nice pair of slacks, slog back and forth between work and home and try, try, try to make your corner of the world a better place to rest your sorry behind and the behinds of your loved ones and what do you get? - another night staring at cable news wondering what the heck went wrong.

   Ask yourself two questions: If you knew you had only one year left to live, what would you do? Secondly, and I think more importantly: If you knew we all had only one year left to live, what would you do?

   Call me a cock-eyed optimist but I can’t help but feel this is a great opportunity and I don’t mean in the “there’s money to be made off this” sense but more in the this is our chance to fulfill our destiny as a magnificent clan of enlightened animals living peaceably in an earthly paradise sense. Think about it: If the end of us all means the end to war, pestilence, hunger, poverty, racism, pain and suffering and there’s only one year left, does it make any make sense to cling to the old divided ways for what little time we have remaining? There’s not enough time to work out our differences or to hammer out some kind of compromise. Its just time to let go of all that and love each other as we were meant to. Now. Don’t we owe each other and ourselves at least that much after all we’ve been through? And hey, its win-win because even in the extreme unlikelihood that the Mayans are wrong and somehow, someway, we manage to survive 2012, we would still have one kick-ass year under our belt and could there really be a good reason not to make it two, or ten, or a hundred, or forever?

To sum up: Yes, we are all going to die so, if this next year is going to be our last one together, let’s go out there and make it a good one.”