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The Beginning of the End (maybe)By BILL DURYEA © St. Petersburg Times, published January 1, 1999 In truth, the millennium cannot even wait for itself. The third thousand-year epoch since Jesus Christ's birth (more about that later) begins in actuality on Jan. 1, 2001, not 2000. But the world does not bother with such technicalities. Entranced by the symbolism of four digits changing, just about the entire world (more about that later, too) has decided the millennium will happen a full year earlier. Perhaps this fact has caught you unawares. You're thinking it's only New Year's Day 1999; you don't even know who won the Fiesta Bowl yet. You thought you had plenty of time still to ponder the significance of the millennium. Three hundred sixty-five days away, right? Don't think in terms of a year, or months, or weeks or days. Think seconds. Next time you go to the post office, look up on the wall. There's the regular clock and then there's something new, a countdown clock calibrated to the hundredth of a second, ticking away like a bomb on Mission: Impossible. 361 days, 11 hours, eight minutes and one second. Make that 361 days, 11 hours, seven minutes and 59 seconds. The world is on a giant egg timer and when the bell goes off no one has the slightest notion what is going to happen. The world's computers might crash in an instant because they aren't equipped to enter the new millennium. Maybe that will cause power plants to fail. Maybe global recession and massive unemployment will follow. Maybe the only people who will survive are the ones who know which plant roots are edible. Then again, maybe the most frightening thing any of us will face is trying to make New Year's Eve dinner reservations at Bern's. We don't know if we should stock up on champagne or canned goods. Are we entering the "end times" or are we celebrating the good times? Should we be relieved that we are escaping the bloodiest century of recorded history, or fearful that we're overdue to finish ourselves off? So, will you fret or will you frolic? Clock's ticking. First, some historical perspective * * *The sheer volume of millennium references in the media (this paper averaged one millennium story a day in 1998) obscures the mustard seed from which it sprang. Our concept of world history in terms of thousand-year epochs is built on a single and singularly obscure chapter in Revelation, the last book of the Bible. In it, Christ reigns for 1,000 years after Satan is cast into a pit. After the millennium has passed the devil emerges again to tempt the world and is vanquished for good. "Death shall be no more," the righteous are assumed into heaven and the sinful banished to hell. The plot is clear. What the Bible never says, though, is when that 1,000 years is supposed to start. Some scholars suggest that Europeans of the Middle Ages, weary of invading barbarian hordes, thought that A.D. 1000 would be a convenient time for Christ's return. Other scholars doubt there was much expectation at all, given that most people did not even bother to number the passing years. Besides Christ might have been born as early as 8 B.C., they argue. Several centuries later, the Roman Catholic Church would declare that biblical references to the millennium were allegorical, but literal interpretations persisted. Members of certain religious sects have been plotting dates for the apocalypse ever since, and with similarly disappointing results. In 1988, Edgar Whisenant, a former NASA engineer, sold or gave away about 4.3-million copies of a book that purported to prove why the end of the world would occur on Sept. 1 of that year. When the date passed without drama, he recalculated and put out a sequel saying the end of the world would occur on Sept. 1, 1989. The sequel did not sell as well. David Koresh's interpretation of the Bible did not correctly predict the end of the world, but it did bring a fiery and deadly end to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. In 1997, the 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult laced up their Nike sneakers and committed mass suicide, timing it so that their spiritual beings could meet a spaceship they believed to be hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet. In some ways, Koresh and Heaven's Gate are extreme examples of a kind of pervasive psychological agitation that takes hold at the end of centuries. Just look at the dire portents we read currently into natural disasters, actual and theoretical. We make movies about asteroids colliding with the earth, we predict the poles will shift, or that they will disappear. We will freeze, we will drown, we will burn up, we will suffocate, we will starve. And now, as if it were tailor-made for the purpose, we have to contend with a global problem of truly unknown proportions: the Y2K (short for Year 2000) computer bug. "We've never had such a guaranteed apocalypse before," said Hillel Schwartz, a cultural historian and senior fellow at the Millennium Institute in Arlington, Va. "There will be computers that fail. The only question is how many." Wet hair in the Information Ice Age * * *As the apocalyptic events go, Y2K is both utterly mundane and utterly unique. It is a man-made problem that can be solved only by man. An unnecessarily frugal act of computer memory space-saving -- using two digits instead of four to represent the year -- has become the embodiment of chaos theory, Schwartz said. "In secular terms this is perfect example of how the chaos that religious people refer to as apocalyptic comes out of a series of cascading events based on one human decision in the 1960s," Schwartz said. And because the problem is beyond any one individual's capacity to solve, Y2K has given rise to widespread interest in survivalism. Forget trying to fix the computers, convert your cash to gold bullion, stock up on canned goods, buy a generator, ammo and a gun and move to the country. Ironically, the Internet has become the medium of choice for technology-fearing survivalists sharing tips, such as "Urban Survival -- Trapping the Grey Squirrel." The rhetoric does not clarify matters. Widely known economist Ed Yardeni of Deutsche Bank Securities in New York has predicted that there is a 70 percent chance of a global recession. His standing in the financial community has made him one of the most often cited, and soberest-sounding, Y2K experts. Others sounding the alarm sound a little less reasoned. Rex Murphy of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. offered this somewhat breathless take on the impending crisis: "The machines are going to freeze and that means everything they run . . . is going to freeze with them. There is nothing in the modern world, from cars to airplanes to hair dryers to TV sets . . . that doesn't owe its proper functioning to a computer chip." It seems unlikely that a hair dryer's computer chip would be date-sensitive. In Tampa, Amie Devero is a co-partner of a company called Millennia Group Inc. And while there are a number of similar-sounding businesses around the Tampa Bay area, offering services such as carpet cleaning, truck sales and investment advice, Devero's company is one of the few that has the specific goal of assuaging our Y2K fears. Her marketing and consulting company sells fix2000 (the software sells for $49.95 and the hardware for $89.95), which makes computers Y2K compliant. "I hear: "It's not a problem,' which is not true," Devero, 34, said. "And I hear the apocalyptic stuff, which is not true either. Those people are just expending a lot more energy on being wrong." Who knows? Y2K may actually help the economy. It's estimated that U.S. businesses will spend $300-billion to $600-billion to bring their computers up to date. The dawning of a new travel industry * * *It will cost only slightly less to take some of the outlandish millennium trips being peddled by travel agents. Consider a 29-day voyage on the Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov that is scheduled to arrive at the Balleny Islands near Antarctica in time to see the first sunrise of the new millennium. Cost: $19,980 to $28,980 (not including airfare). "We've had people signed up for this trip with a deposit of $500 for as long as five years," said Amy Shepherd, the program manager of Seattle-based Zegrahm Expeditions. The Royal Greenwich Observatory in England, the world's time-keeper, confirms that the Balleny Islands will see the new year's first sunrise. At that latitude, the sun is below the horizon less than an hour every day. Balmier locales have not been deterred from their self-promotion. The Republic of Kiribati, the islands which straddle the dateline, went so far as to declare that all its islands would now share the time zone enjoyed by those living on the west (earlier) side of the dateline. The fact that one of the islands is about 1,300 miles to the east of the dateline did not get in the way of maximizing tourist-dollar revenue. Paris officials plan to perfume the waters of the Seine and at midnight a giant, luminous egg will have completed its hourlong descent down the Eiffel Tower. Closer to home, the owners of Medieval Times in Kissimmee have a $92.95 dinner that includes jousting and commemorative goblet and T-shirt. Bern's, the famous Tampa steakhouse that has no windows and has never seen a ray of natural light much less the dawn of the new millennium, is already getting inquiries. "Last New Year's Eve they were asking about the millennium," said office manager Kirby Uncle. The restaurant may not begin to accept reservations until Oct. 1, Uncle said. It might be some consolation to know a Tampa company has gone to some trouble to ensure your millennium celebration is memorable, no matter where you pop the cork. Millennium Licensing, formed in 1996, now owns the U.S. trademark to attach the word "millennium" to any beverage from bottled spring water to vodka. Its subsidiary Millennium Beverage Co. already has put spring water on local store shelves, said Todd Walker, chairman and president, and beer and vodka are expected to follow soon. But the company's marketing triumph will occur when Millennium champagne (produced by Batavia Wines, the makers of Great Western) debuts next April at roughly $9.99 a bottle, according to Walker. "It's not Dom Perignon," said Walker, a 39-year-old lawyer. "But it will be very drinkable." And potentially very lucrative. Walker said the company expects to sell "in excess of 300,000 cases next year." Is there life after the Apocalypse? * * *What happens if the Apocalypse (biblical or technological) does not arrive as the ultimate hangover remedy? What if we're all here the day after, condemned to be claimed by more run-of-the-mill risk factors? What then? Schwartz, the millennium scholar, sees as much reason for optimism heading into the next millennium as he does uncertainty. The world experienced seismic political shifts in the latter part of the century: the fall of Communism, the end of apartheid, the possibility of peace in the Middle East, among them. But the wholesale elimination of society's ills has yet to occur and recent years have been characterized by "an interminable waiting and fidgeting and frustration," he said. The onus is on society to focus on how to achieve that transformation, and that will require intellectual energy at least as intense as the marketing firepower spent promoting New Year's celebrations. The truth is that millions of people will live roughly half their lives on each side of the millennial divide. They will have to ask themselves how they will define their place in history, Schwartz said. "Given how gruesome much of the 20th century was," he said, "do I want to identify with the 20th century or do I want to give myself over to the unknown of the 21st century?"
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he millennium waits for no one.
