Sara Levine & Kate Howard
Features Editor & News Editor
On Saturday, May 21, many were counting down the seconds to 6 p.m., wondering if and how the world was “going to end”. The idea spurred conversation when 89 year old radio evangelist Harold Camping declared this day the “invisible judgment day” and warned people of the Rapture, also known as Christ’s return.
While most students shrugged off the claims, many found themselves angling their day based on the prediction. “I was sitting in tech and we made a list of all the things we should do before the end,” sophomore Jessica Sandor said. “But we didn’t actually do them since we knew the world wasn’t ending.”
Unlike Jessica, senior Chris Dudley felt uneasy when first hearing about the recent allegations. “After I heard about the end of the world claims, I immediately shut off all contact with the outside world and hid in my room for an entire weekend, subsisting on Twinkies and a jar of lard. I cried a lot obviously. When I realized it wasn’t true, I cried more because I wasted all that time crying.”
Popular student disbelief of the claim remained and students have voiced their irritation at the excessive advertisement. “It is the most ridiculous thing and people that believe it are insane,” sophomore Harrison Besser said.
The religious evidence provided by enthusiasts like Camping has also been ineffective at gaining support. Sophomore Sam Murray argued, “I don’t think that the recent attempts to predict the end of the world have been religiously motivated at all.” Chris agreed, stating, “Fake doomsday predictions happen all the time, what is interesting is the predictor’s excuse for the world not ending.”
Regarding his false speculation, Camping said that he wasn’t reading the bible spiritually but factually. He has now pushed the date to October 21 of this year. As people who did not believe his first date ridicule his excuse, many wonder whether the claim even had support in the first place. “I don’t personally know anybody that believes in the claims, but millions of dollars were raised so support is definitely there,” senior Bijan Tehrani said.
Many students are also convinced that science would detect the end if one existed in our future. “Science definitely would have picked up on something,” sophomore Will Hennessy said. Bijan added, “According to science, we still have several billion years before the end [of the world].”
Although the majority of the world assumed the claims were false, several mysterious and unordinary sightings were captured on the day. Sophomore Jackie Cloud was at a crew regatta when a few questionable events occurred. “On the day of the so-called ‘end of the world,’ I was at a race and there was a dead body found in the river and a car crash right outside our tent,” she said.
The topic of the end of the world has appeared in movies like “2012” and played in songs, such as Britney Spears’ “Till the World Ends.” According to sophomore Wheatley Raabe, the media has exhausted this apocalyptic theme whether it’s in books, movies, music, or on the TV screens. “The media overplays and hypes up the idea, slowly making it more and more popular, and by the next day when I am in school everybody’s talking about it,” she said.
While the world did not come to an end on May 21, many old predictions are still circling and new ones are bound to arise. Senior Katie Scott believes that our society continues to fabricate these theories to satisfy our curiosity with an answer to something that has yet to be proven scientifically. “Extreme scenarios – for example, apocalypses – allow us to step back and examine our culture and our values,” she said. “It’s a way of understanding what is and what isn’t.”
