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It's the year 2000, and not a moment too soon. Sadly, it's not a new millennium yet (that really happens next year*), which means we may be in for another barrage of portentous mass-media froth; I truly hope not.
As the most millenarian of nations, the US had high hopes for Y2K--the year, the crisis, the snack treat. After over a year of panicked prognostication, religious cant and noxious advertising, however, the rollover to four new digits on the calendar was uneventful. No fireballs from the firmament. No major blackouts. No financial meltdowns. No hurtling elevators. No gun-wielding underclass flooding the streets. You could sense the disappointment beneath the newsreaders' cheery cadences.
Many Y2K "experts" kept their chins up by predicting problems later in the year. But the fact remained that after all that scary buildup, and even an apocalyptic TV movie (click: breakdown of civil society. Grab a firearm and bolt the doors), the transition proved scarcely more explosive than a popping champagne cork.
In short: It's just another year. Let's recap, shall we?
| 1. | God/Jesus/Satan did not vaporize humanity for its sins. |
| 2. | The righteous were not swept into the Golden Kingdom or issued harps. |
| 3. | The wicked did not topple into the fiery pit. |
| 4. | The dead did not claw their way out of their graves and menace the envious living. |
| 5. | War did not erupt in Jerusalem. |
| 6. | Space aliens did not descend to earth for a Spielbergian moment of interstellar revelation. |
| 7. | A new era of enlightened collectivism involving vegan diets, hemp clothing, Ecstasy-fueled all-night raves and voting rights for quadrupeds did not dawn. |
But take heart, gentle believer. The intense, eager desire for something to happen at the stroke of 2000 has eclipsed, for the moment, the more modest but nonetheless noteworthy spiritual benefits of nothing happening:
| 1. | This is a huge setback for religious extremists. |
| 2. | We can now answer the question: "What do we do now?" We get on with it. We build meaning as we go along, in real time. We do not wait for a spot on the calendar to flood our lives with significance or drama. |
| 3. | We can spend some quality time pondering the fact that we filled the vast nothingness of the millennium with a lot of bullshit hype. That much of 1999 will be remembered by the phrase, "As we stand at the dawn of a new millennium, try our hemorrhoid cream." That the Discover Card logo's precedence in one city's New Year's Eve display made it seem like the raison d'tre for the whole celebration. Possible moral: If we offer ourselves up as empty vessels to be filled with meaning, we will be fed commercials with an auger. If we step on an express train marked "Judgment day" or "Paradise," it will take us no farther than the mall. |
| 4. | Very few people desired the collapse of civil society, which may actually mean that its preservation, despite its myriad flaws, is worth something to a lot of us. |
| 5. | An unexpectedly large number of people stayed home and enjoyed one another's company, reaffirming that many of us prefer to mark momentous times in our living rooms with loved ones rather than at overwhelming public spectacles. |
| 6. | TV news in general sucks, but local news sucks titanic rubber donkey dongs. If we're to cling to the millennial vision of fiery, eternal damnation, let us devoutly hope that a substantial lot in said Satanic sauna is reserved for the creeps and cretins who feed us "spectacular footage" of misery and dread every hour. Let us pray that the ghouls who stick microphones and cameras in the faces of bereaved families will spend an agonizing forever in the acid soup of retribution. For they are the worst of the worst. No slasher-themed video game, no adolescent rap/metal fantasy of mass disemboweling is more nakedly evil than the sanctimonious truisms of the local news coven as their treacherous rictuses segue from robotic sympathy to weather-themed japes. They were the ones most fervently hoping for a Y2K debacle. They were the ones waiting to watch our gory ruin from their shining helicopters, and they would've raised a diet cola to the "spectacular footage" our suffering provided. Turn that mendacious drivel off and your life will improve markedly--I guarantee it. |
Whew! That felt good.
Having gotten that diatribe off my chest, I'm ready for another year. It'll be full of surprises, pleasant and unpleasant, with plenty of spectacular footage, no doubt. But after the non-event that was our promised doom, I feel resilient, even optimistic.
It's the year 2000--can you believe it?
--Simon Glickman
* A CNN functionary summed it all up nicely by advising viewers to stop writing in to protest that the millennium ends/begins in 2001. Most people think it ends in 2000, she explained, so the network was going with that. It's a great precedent for a news outlet, don't you think? Perhaps CNN and its broadcast brethren will follow this decision to its logical end and let the least informed segments of popular belief determine their coverage of international politics, duly identifying themselves as "the Zionist media" and decrying the advance of "mongrel races." Eventually, the widespread belief that angels and aliens walk among us might put an appropriately misty-eyed or paranoid slant on the stories of the day.