The year 2000 began with a genuine sense of history. Once the ball dropped and Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve continued without blackouts, internet outages, or planes falling from the sky (that wouldn't be for another 20 months), we celebrated as citizens of a New Millennium, laying the groundwork not just for the next century but the next ten centuries!
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| We started with eyewear |
When the media spoke of the Y2K bug, a glitch that would convince the world's computer systems that the year had turned to Zero, it was in apocalyptic terms. Yet, in a sense, it did feel like Year Zero, in that there was a sense of renewal, of possibility. We were living in the future, Two Thousand! Even I, a fifth grader, ten years old, felt it. I seem to recall the slightest hitch in my breath when some joker turned the lights off just as the countdown hit "three....two...ONE...HAPPY NEW YEAR", but soon I was swept up in the emotion, in watching the people around me - mom, Dad, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - celebrate how we, they, had made it. There were people in the room who seemed to have seen it all: WWII, the moon landing, the Concorde, the internet at your fingertips, now marveling that they were part of this new era. My God, what would we do with this blank slate, this call to shape the world?
We would keep living, it turns out. The real opportunity to shape the 21st Century would not come until November (it was an election year!). Until then, we returned to work, to school, back to reading The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, to doing homework while watching Pepper Ann in the afternoon, to evenings with Dilbert and Malcolm in the Middle.
And people went right back to the movies. Indeed, some went the very first day of this New Millennium....
