Doomsday Prophecies

I think these are the worst things to captivate imaginations of generations of students.  It is quite possibly the worst alibi towards doing nothing that a student can propose and yet it is so common.

I can't begin to tabulate the number of times a student has said, "What's the point, the world's going to end in 2012 anyway."  So why are they wasting the last months of their lives in school?

Students take things so literally or they turn to these explanations out of sheer laziness that it is really scary.  What I would like to see is a student who puts so much energy into believing something that when it turns out they are wrong, they put the same amount of energy into punishing their own gullibility.

But alas, that is asking for too much.  Students rarely respond to this level of gullibility by preparing themselves for the next doomsday prophecy.  They go from one to the next.  First it was the Y2K scare during the 1999 to 2000 transition, now it's the 2012 doomsday prophecized by the end of the long count of the Mayan calendar.  What's next?  The Earth will be struck by a marshmallow comet in 2015?

What really annoys me is the lack of consequences for scares like this.  People really should be held responsible for making such extraordinary claims they have no evidence for. On top of this, the recruitment of others into believing their claims only makes matters worse.

But why is it that there are no serious consequences for incorrectly prophecizing the end of the world but there are consequences for misleading the public into believing you cured an incurable disease?  Why is it that there are consequences for getting people's hopes up but no consequences for spreading mass/irrational fear through stupidity?

Just another one of those questions we'll never see answered until people start taking their heads out of their asses.