The fear mongers
When we have large section of people who tend to believe 2012 doomsday predictions there is another important section which wants people to believe it!! These sections of people keep looking for an opportunity to make big money and this is just right for them.
Take a look at our Hollywood moviemakers. They keep looking for such new concepts. While doomsday is not a new concept, it appeared now again with a freshness in it. So Roland Emmerich came up with movie ‘2012’ which has a budget of $200 million and grossed more than $767 million. This is 5th highest grossing film in 2009[‘The Day After Tomorrow’ which was also a disaster movie depicted catastrophic effects of global warming and was directed by same director. Gross revenue of that movie is $544 million]. Moviemakers know that movies based on a catastrophic disaster are rare to fail in box office. So they jump as soon as they hear such disaster prediction. Now to make a movie they need a story. And as it is fiction they need not care for facts. If they go for facts they would end up making a non-disaster movie!! So you can be sure that always a movie based on disaster has to show disaster happenning. And of course they don’t have choice but having the main character to support that prediction by providing facts. And as we need to make movie interesting it will have lot and lot of skeptics and almost all government officials and scientists would go against him. You can note that these skeptics won’t bother to check evidences or details but they just laugh off. Director is well aware that otherwise it doesn’t impress the viewers much. So the story goes…
The same thing applies to media as well. They want viewers. So they want exciting news. And now they got it: 2012!! They really don’t want to take sides because they are well aware of its impact. People will get the idea or the point that media is depicting. And excitement no longer sustains. So they continue their struggle to retain that excitement in the mass as long as possible. How can I forget it influenced a young child in India for suicide over LHC collider doomsday fear?!
Even in newspapers I rarely see an article condemning this 2012 hoax published in front page or at a location where people can notice it quickly. You will get it somewhere in the middle of newspaper with some 30-40 lines scribbled where rarely someone takes pain to read.
The question we need to consider is, is it moral or ethical for media including television, newspapers, and movies to depict a baseless prediction as some top priority issue? When we have grave concerns in our society such as economic imbalance, poverty, terrorism etc how moral it is to divert all attention to doomsday stuff? They have forgotten their moral responsibilities. They are moved to a stage where they don’t have anything left but to look out for profits. They have lost their souls. They are well aware of the impact of this on the society. Still they continue with what brings them money.
While I don’t believe all of them belong to this category what we see today shows majority of them belong to this category.
What about the religious gurus? They are welcomed with great respect and provided a nice chair to sit and every facility one could seek for. Then these gurujis start talking. They talk about just everything in the universe from science to philosophy to your lives. I hate to see it. It’s irritating to the core. But I force myself to sit and hear him talking things he isn’t aware of because that’s how we understand them, study them. But these gurujis have studied minds, minds of the common. They know very well what to say and when to say. All they know is mantras which make them superior to others. Apart from that they know nothing. They come and talk about science? It is disgrace to science. They are going to tell us what global warming is? Ask him the definition of global warming. They are going to tell me if I do pooja god will be happy and let me escape from doomsday? Doesn’t god know how to distinguish good from the bad but need a pooja to do that? Every saying of these guruji get them one of the two things: Name or Money.
If I hurt feelings of any of the readers I beg your pardon. Our true enemy is not our differences in opinions. It is not our respective religions, not our casts, not our colors, not the borders that separate us. But it is these people who have lost their morality and it is their greed. I feel very sad when I see we give so much respect and waste our money on so many useless things because some guruji asked for it. I wonder why can’t we just analyze and see what life he is leading, where our money is going, how he can have his own home, car, nice amenities and his own living!!
Let these gurujis and babas aside, we have politicians to look at as well. What intention a politician can have in supporting doomsday? There are many reasons why they might be willing to support doomsday hype. In Karnataka [India] we already have a chief minister who performs pooja for anything and everything imaginable. The very first day he became chief minister he went and performed pooja to his chief minister chair!! Now if he himself believes in doomsday theory I won’t be surprised. That is anyway his personal belief and does not fall under this topic.
But I want to discuss the dangers of influence of such beliefs in a minister. It is not really surprising if we start seeing government projects put on hold because they want to see what would be the impact of 2012 doomsday. They will say we will resume work if everything is fine or else we might lose large sum of amount vanished by doomsday partial catastrophe!! Why does people need any education, any facilities when they are about to die soon in disasters? What if we see a partial damage and damage is done at the places where we are planning to invest money? Also why can’t government itself perform a Maha Yajna for the sake of good of all the people in the state?
Though these look very farfetched this kind of thought will definitely influence politicians. And not only politicians but also the common people who with such thought might become less resistive to any injustice. This very same doomsday news can be used as a very effective weapon to divert people’s thoughts from current burning issues to something that actually doesn’t exist.
It is very much possible and majority of politicians we know won’t hesitate to use this for their own advantage.
These people are the fear mongers who do not wish you to forget the 2012 doomsday until it surpasses and they can come up with a new doomsday prediction.
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