They’re stealing the millennium.
An odd coalition of corporate consultants and doomsday kooks is hijacking what could have been one of the most ennobling events of our lives. It could have been–it should have been–an unprecedented opportunity for all of humankind to stand back and contemplate where the species has been and where it is going.
Instead, they’ve turned it into a short-term crisis. Worse, they’ve turned it into a problem for which they–this handful of techno-tinkerers and dried-fruit survivalists–would sell us solutions.
I’m referring, of course, to the mounting hysteria over the Y2K computer glitch.
Sure there are going to be problems that first day of the new year, when the internal clocks of old computer chips and software programs can’t process the four-digit rollover. I fully expect my Mr. Coffee won’t snap on at 7 a.m. that Saturday, forcing me to reset. So what?
I am reasonably confident, though, that the gas and electric will be there and that my Tribune will be on the front porch. Granted, this will have required advance troubleshooting on the part of certain large corporations and governmental units. But hey, more heroic preparations are made all the time for important upcoming events. Our tightly choreographed air assault on Serbia is a case in point. The joint chiefs didn’t plan it the night before over coffee in the officers’ club. It’s called contingency planning, and to one extent or another, we all do it. It’s why toy stores order extra before Christmas. It’s why, with April showers just around the corner, I make sure my sump pump is plugged in. Big deal.
But no, the techies and the bunker-boosters are playing this Y2K stuff for all it’s worth. And that means America’s corporate powers-that-be are duty-bound to take all of this very seriously. The suits are convinced, you see, that a small army of class-action attorneys is out there, waiting and watching, ready to document every publicly held company’s Y2K screwups and to file lawsuits on behalf of opportunistic shareholders.
One danger here is that what should have been a year or two of quiet preparation by a limited number of technical specialists soon may boil into a general panic.
Hoarding of some kinds of emergency supplies and medicines already has begun. As more of the public sees and hears “experts” talking about nuclear plant meltdowns, accidental ICBM launches and such, the buying frenzy will spread to grocery stores and gas stations. Look for gun dealers to do a brisk trade as ordinary people start imagining themselves thrust into a Mel Gibson movie.
Y2K anxiety also threatens the eight-year upswing in the business cycle. Computer sales, for instance, already are falling off because many companies rushed to replace their Y2K-vulnerable gear well in advance of digital doomsday. Last week it was announced that orders for U.S. durable goods, including computers, fell last month at the steepest rate since 1991.
Some experts, moreover, warn that all kinds of financial accounts–from checking deposits to mutual fund portfolios–could be accidentally zeroed out by the millennium bug. Gullible investors will be inclined to “go to cash,” perhaps even literally. The Y2K Cassandras already are telling people to withdraw a few hundred extra greenbacks “just in case” electronic transactions, from credit cards to ATMs, are temporarily disrupted.
But it’s not the prospect of self-fulfilling panic that has me bugged about Y2K. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, folks will little note nor long remember the inconveniences we are about to experience.
The real shame here is that we ought to be focusing our millennial energies on more important concepts.
One thousand years ago there were no newspapers, no printing presses, no mass media of any kind worthy of the term.
There was no decimal system and no general belief that the Earth might be a shape other than flat. The world population, around 250 million (less than present-day U.S.) had grown hardly at all over the previous thousand years. How could it? There was no germ theory, no sanitary infrastructure, no science-based medicine. Half of all children died before their fifth birthday.
That’s where we’ve been.
Where we’re going is the stuff of dreams. Present trends in population growth and environmental degradation may be unsustainable. But the technological tools now at our fingertips (primitive tools compared to what we’ll have by 2100) suggest that solutions can be invented to meet just about any challenge.
This is big, cosmic, blue-sky talk, I know. But isn’t that exactly what the millennium should be about? During every previous millennial cusp humankind was too busy surviving to ponder its past or future.
This, then, will be our first self-aware millennium. And what is it we’re talking about? Whether we stocked enough candles and bottled water? Whether our thermostats are programmed with a Y2K-vulnerable code?
We were put here, we lucky few, at a very special time . . . a time for great, inspiring thoughts.
So never mind the canned meat and the powdered milk. Let’s start asking how we’re going to get protein in 2500.
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