The Mayan Mantra 2012

The Mayan b’ak’tun (5,121 year cycle) calendar ends in 2012, which our purveyors in the commerce of gloom (Roland Emmerich’s movie 2012 was released on a Friday the 13th) took advantage of to promote their eschatological apocalypse (not dissimilar to the U.S. foreign policy of Armageddon and its designation of nations in the Axis of Evil), and the theophony of doom (feeding into our apocalyptic dreams and the American penchant for end-of-the world scenarios)!

The movie shot by the same folks of Independence Day were out to entertain, but marketing principle dictates that one takes advantage of people’s propensities, and at the personal level, the urge to die is just as strong as the will to survive.

It is thus no surprise that Michelle Bachmann, in the continuing journey of the GOP into the native hearts of Americans and the passage of American politics into irrelevance, added Russia and China on her list of the Axis of Evil. The wonder is not that she echoed a Republican fear; it is that she plays to an audience ready to sing the Hallelujah Chorus each time she raises a flag to this type of pronouncement.

Beyond personal psychology, the human race marches to two beats: entropy and empathy. “Entropy” came into my vocabulary when Jeremy Rifkin in 1980 wrote his “comprehensive world view.” Pulling out the Entropy Law-the Second Principle of Thermodynamics-it states that “all energy flows inexorably from the orderly to the disorderly and from the usable to the unusable. Whenever a semblance of order is created anywhere on Earth or in the universe, it is done at the expense of causing greater disorder in the surrounding environment.”

Three reasons Rifkin caught our attention. I was (’72-’86) a mendicant monastic “blue shirt” (sought charity giving to support our work, though stayed in being by communal self-support) who kept our ear to the ground on anyone and anybody who was drumming up common sense work to understand “reality” as it is. Rifkin came highly recommended.

A second reason was the fact that Rifkin was my contemporary, born the same year ahead by only a few months. His major epiphany came in ’67 when he witnessed his fraternity brothers beating up protesters against the Vietnam War. He then became a formidable student activist against the war. My major epiphany happened with the Apollo 8 “earthrise” photos in ’68 when my wife and I became members of a visible/invisible global servant force!

The third reason was silly and very personal. Rifkin’s mother’s family name is Ravel; mine is Ravelo.

But in 1980, while Rifkin was airing a cautionary note to American progress, science and technology from its industrial revolution with the flipside reality of “crisis, chaos, pollution, and decay,” condemning corporate tyranny, I was trekking in Central and South America working with village level distributive economic development efforts that depended on local efforts and utilized existing and available resources.

Rifkin went on to become an authoritative voice in forecasting economic trends, while I went on with my participatory “Yes, you can” efforts into the Saipan sunset of oblivion.

Now Rifkin pulls out his other e-word: emphathy. In 2010, he wrote The Emphatic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, taking a wide swath of psychology, biology, and philosophy, and concluding that humans do have a choice between the natural processes of life, entropy, and empathy. On Saipan, I promoted the Japanese notion for “glocal” awareness (global) and action (local), and Rifkin and I found ourselves at the same crossroad again. The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World is Rifkin seeing the power of distributive capitalism versus corporate tyranny; we are back on the same page.

In this early part of 2012, when the drumbeats are loudest again in the direction of entropy, misleading us to taking the long cyclical traditions of the Mayan calendar as pointing to a cataclysmic ending of an era, I am reminded of a Mayan colleague in 1980 in Guatemala.

A professional Guillermo worked as a “blue shirt” in an agrarian reform site. Rios Montt, the ruling Christian evangelical military warrior, was the country’s executive. We worked that April with villagers on drip irrigation, battling to increase production and broaden participatory democracy. Earlier January, Mayan peasants occupied Spain’s embassy in protest against the Guatemalan military. Against the expressed wishes of the Spanish ambassador, the Guatemalan government stormed the embassy, killing 36 of the protesters. Spain, as a result, withdrew diplomatic relations for four years. The 1980 incident would be a turning point in the Guatemalan civil war of 1960-96, with the emergence of the Frente patriotico 31 de enero (Patriotic Front of 31 January).

Guillermo quietly protested with deeds, but shortly after we left training school, he went home for a week’s respite. He never made it home. He was pointed out as a dissident, arrested, and never seen again.

My only Mayan friend Guillermo did not labor for the end of the world, but for its transformation. Entropic process is real but we do have the choice toward empathetic civilization. It is not an easy dance to learn, almost like Obama steps: one forward, two backward. But transformation was Guillermo’s mantra. It is ours as well.