You may remember that there was a time when apartheid in South Africa seemed unstoppable.

Sure, there were international boycotts of South African businesses, banks, and tourist attractions. There were heroic activists in South Africa, who were going to prison and even dying for freedom. But the conventional wisdom remained that these were principled gestures with little chance of upending the entrenched system of white rule.

"The accurate content of the message for the Maya Prophecy for our times is that the date of December 21, 2012 is nothing more than a general marker, a specific date that infact indicates a whole era, an era of hope, an era of opportunity - the opportunity to re-establish a sense of community amongst all humans of this planet..." -From The Maya Taino Prophecy Initiative, led by Maya Elder Antonio Aj Ik and Taino Elder Miguel Sague - www.mayatainoprophecy.webs.com

December 21, 2012 marks the Shifting of World Ages, a return to zero point, where we officially transition from the current 5,125 year World Age Cycle, and enter into a New World Cycle; marking a new level of our unfoldment as a planetary collective; a new level of our human evolution in concert with our living Universe.

This article is adapted from a speech Bill Moyers gave in October at Public Citizen’s fortieth-anniversary gala.

During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us."

"The splitting of the atom changed everything - save man's mode of thinking, thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe." - Albert Einstein

Given the arrogance and hubris of modern civilization after the nuclear core meltdown and release of extremely high amounts of dangerous radiation from the cooling rods of the badly damaged Fukishima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan, a sad realization came loud and clear - humanity is pathologically bent on a path to total species extinction, not only of other living creatures, but of our own human race.

Remember this - extinction is a total waste of time!

This, my friends, is not the first wake-up call, but it may very well be the last.