Video Fridays: 2026 or 12,026: What Would Kushim Think?

This one popped up in my feeds… I wonder what difference it would make if we did mark our year based on the beginning of human civilization instead of the birth of the mythic Christian Messiah (which they got wrong by at least 4 years)? I know that the Chinese and Jewish cultures have a different designation to our current time designation (it is 4724 on the traditional Chinese calendar or 5787 for the Hebrews), but that designation is treated as less than a footnote. How different would our focus be if we didn’t mark time from a Christian/Roman centric sense of time? I’m sure that this idea would break the brains of anyone who is under the mistaken notion that whatever reality they’re experiencing is the only reality that there is or ever has been. What do you mean that we should be celebrating the year 12, 027 in the coming new year? Hell, we can’t get the US Congress to pass a law getting rid of Daylight Saving time/Standard time divide. [Sign].

When I was a Biblical Studies major I was used to looking at history in 2,000 and 4,000 year chunks. I thought this fixation for US-centric or European centric tracking of time that’s closer to 100- or 200- year chunks as silly. And then when I briefly was an Anthropology major (at CSUF!) it was pretty clear to me that there is so much that we just don’t know because of the scarcity of artifacts and especially writing, very much does not give us a clear view of history at all and creates a bias towards things that don’t disintegrate over the centuries or based on the humidity of the location. And this tendency to measure things based on the pathetically short length of a human lifetime is just a none starter. How much different would we feel if we had a better “connection” to all of the ancestral cultures and not just the ones that left stone statues or weren’t destroyed by a younger culture. It’s all something to think about, especially when many would claim to “know” the important things when we can’t begin to imagine what we’ve already lost and whether what we know is the “important things.” All I know is I’m more likely to trust someone who is sincere when they say, “I don’t know, but I’m willing to learn,” versus someone or some cultures that parade around claiming to understand it all. Little wonder that I spend all of my time working on and re-engineering my LEGO city. 😎 Enjoy and have a great weekend. I want to share a beer with Kushim. JBB