Purniya Awan
Staff Writer
@excalweb
According to calendars created by the Mayans (an advanced Mesoamerican civilization that existed from 2000 BCE until their destruction by the Spanish in 1697 CE), the end of humanity will come December 21, 2012 when some catastrophe is predicted to demolish the world. Many theorize that the end of the world will come from astronomical events, from a “killer” solar flare to a huge asteroid.
Others, like Young, however, theorize that the end of humanity may just come from a nuclear war.
Young started preparing for Doomsday after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, even after peace was maintained. His thoughts on surviving things like nuclear war stayed with him throughout his childhood and even now.
“I wrote a short story when I was 12 about my age group in school withstanding the Soviet invasion,” says Young who has read about hundreds of wars and deadly disasters. “So things like that were on my mind as I grew up.”
Young is not alone though. The preparation-centric fiction he writes and publishes on the internet has a readership of well over 10,000 and the number of people who have started preparing seems to be increasing as days go by.
“There are thousands upon thousands of other people doing their best to get ready for anything from a loss of a job, to medical emergencies, all the way up to Doomsday,” says Young.
The amount of people preparing for the end has grown big enough that there is a network dedicated to helping them known as the American Preppers Network (APN).
The network defines these “preppers” as a group of people who have started preparing for Doomsday, or TEOTWAWKI—The End of the World as We Know It. There are “preppers” in the United States and in parts of Canada, Australia, and Italy, according to Tom Martin, founder and chief visionary officer of the APN
The network already has over seven thousand “likes” on their Facebook page and has gained the attention of organizations like the BBC and Popular Mechanics.
The way Young and Martin both see it is that the world right now is not very sustainable, whether you look at it from a financial point of view or an environmental one. The radical weather patterns and the frequent occurrences of natural disasters around the world indicate to them that something big is going to happen which will either destroy the world or change the world that we know today.
Which is why Young says that it’s important to be prepared for not only “Doomsday,” but for accidents and disasters which can occur at any time.
While Young does not believe the popular Mayan prophecies about the world ending by the end of this year, he does however, believe that several natural cycles are reaching either peaks or lows, depending on the type of cycle, with the sunspot cycle one of the key ones, indicating that some bad natural disasters will occur.
When asked what kind of advice Young has for university students, he suggested that we forget about preparing for “Doomsday” for the moment and make preparations for basic human needs first.
Martin’s advice reflected the views of Young: “Students need to learn how to budget and manage their finances since things like credit cards and loans will not be useful when a disaster strikes. Students should learn how to make their own meals and make sure they have enough food stocked up for at least three months.”
Some preppers may follow the Mayan calendar, but they all have one common goal: to be prepared on a daily basis just in case they are faced with a natural disaster of some sort.
