As everyone from NASA to George Lucas have issued statements striving to debunk the rumors of an impending apocalypse world, people are still flocking to buy “apocalypse kits,” setting up old school bomb shelters in their basements and stockpiling enough groceries to last six months. It’s an urban fantasy gone awry—and there are a slew of con artists who are exploiting the hype to the fullest.

As sales of young adult books with post apocalyptic themes top the best seller lists, the people reading them must be letting their imaginations get carried away. There’s a flurry of females signing up for combat classes, buying guns and learning extreme survival skills that will probably never be put to use. The only good thing coming out of this is that more and more people are singing up on the Save the Pearls website and joining the campaign.

The 2012 apocalypse rumor is not the first of its kind—not by a long shot. Predictions of an apocalypse world have been rampant since the beginning of time. Everyone from the Greeks and Romans to Native Americans and Nostradamus has created their own brand of mythical rapture. Whether it’s prompted by a full moon eclipse or an earthquake followed by a Tsunami, some religious sect or post modern cultural group has a theory about the destruction of our world as we know it. Yet if you look back through history, it seems that cultures around the world have already experienced some form of their own apocalypse—whether through a holocaust, war or natural disaster—and these same cultures still exist.

Two of the most referenced documents that instill hysteria among the masses are the Mayan Calendar and the Book of Revelations. It seems just as realistic to believe the stories in dystopian novels and other young adult books! While the Mayans never actually predicted that 2012 meant the onset of an apocalypse world (it merely marked the end of the Mayan calendar), the Book of Revelations offers a pretty harrowing account of our future. Only a religion based on fear would offer such fodder for creating hysteria. Switch it out with an urban fantasy novel with dystopian themes and you’d have the same effect.

If only these same believers would put that energy towards helping to save the pearls!

Source: appadvice.com