.KEYWORD posty2k
.FLYINGHEAD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
.TITLE Welcome to the new millennium
.DEPT
.SUMMARY Somehow, our intrepid leader managed to get Bill Clinton, Milli Vanilli, Karen Carpenter, cigars, loincloths, IBM, Eudora, pointy-eared Vulcans, flush-toilets, and Charlemagne all into one reasonably lucid editorial. What can we say? Read it and see if he somehow succeeds in pulling it off.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
If you’re reading this, I guess we made it.
Of course, that might not be true. If you’re reading the one printed copy that I affixed to the wall of my cave, then society probably tanked. Go back to gathering wood! And you, I asked for flint and steel. The side body panel of a Saturn automobile is plastic. Old VHS copies of "In Like Flint" swiped from the rubble of a Blockbuster don’t count. You can’t start fires with either of those.
For the rest of this article, I’m assuming we made it. If we didn’t, well, you shouldn’t be reading this anyway. You should be learning how to make deerskin loincloths.
Aside: it’s always a challenge writing these things before the fact. I’m writing this Christmas week of 1999, but it’ll be read right after Y2K on January 1st. You could almost think of this as an ancient and sacred text. After all, it was written in an earlier millennium.
So, we made it! I figured we would. I’m sure some things will fail (or is that "have failed?") We discovered that Eudora’s Change Queuing function got confused about the date change. Messages sent in December 1999 and queued up for delivery in 2000 wound up arriving right away. Oops. But we’ll live.
I’m sure there’ll be some other gotchas, too. The government’s on high terrorist alert. I really hope no one does anything stupid and, as you’re reading this, I’m hoping everyone’s OK. I think going to Times Square’s nuts, but I’m hoping it was just nuts, not horrible.
But enough of the doom and gloom. We’re at the dawn of a new millennium. Seriously. Pretty cool, huh?
Many of us know the concept of "imprint events" — those events during which each and every one of us knows right where we were at the moment the event occurred. Older folks know exactly where they were when JFK was assassinated. Younger folks may remember the Challenger disaster (I was in my car on Route 1 in the San Francisco Bay Area). You know where you were.
But January 1, 2000, is one of those points in time about which we’ve all wondered, "Where will I be?" That was certainly the case for me. I remember it vividly. I must’ve been eight or nine years old (I was born in 1961 — hey, my parents and many others didn’t even know if we’d survive The Cuban Missile Crisis. No one could have predicted The Presidential Cigar Crisis).
I remember being in my bedroom. The walls were an IBM Blue shade of blue. This was during my astronaut phase, so the walls were also covered with posters of space ships, flight paths, blueprints, and all the cool stuff of the Space Race era. I was thinking about the future and what it would be like. Would there be flying cars? Would we live on the moon? How old would I be? I was shocked when I realized I’d be ancient. My God, I’d be 38!
A lot’s gone on since the time I was that pre-pubescent young man. I’ve grown tremendously both physically (yep, diet time again, but this time I’m working out) and emotionally. I’ve been weathered and seasoned. I’ve pretty much grown up.
The thing is, as a grown up, my life’s a much different picture than I expected, which makes sense. I didn’t know what to expect then. I certainly didn’t expect the changes in family structures that have swept through our culture (and I wouldn’t have understood them as an eight year old, anyway). I didn’t expect to run a company. I didn’t expect the incredibly cool wonder that’s the Internet.
I think I expected there to be cool toys (and I’m so glad, as an adult, that that one turned out right). I don’t have a flying car (well, except for that one night in my twenties when I reached almost 100 mph… But that’s another story). On the other hand, I do have a phone I can carry everywhere. I have a highly programmable computer that fits in my pocket. And, thanks to the loaner from OmniSky, that computer fits in my pocket and accesses the World Wide Web from my backyard, the top of a mountain, or inside a restaurant.
The thing is, now I know. It’s weird. I know. All my life, I’ve wondered,"What will I be like when it turns 2K?" And now I know.
I feel like I’m on the top of the world, looking down on creation. It’s the only explanation I can find.
With credit to Karen Carpenter for great lyrics, I really do feel this way. I’ve got this wonderful audience, all of you, and I feel as though I’m able to look all the way back, not just a hundred years, but a thousand years. And even better, I feel like we can look all the way forward, too.
What will the next thousand years be like?
We’ve been taking the easy way out, wondering whether cars will fly, whether we’ll have bases on Mars, whether Bill Clinton will ever grow up.
But what will it really be like?
It seems like such an amazingly long period of time that we might even evolve into beings of pure energy or some other concept from a bad episode of "The Original Series." But it’s not that long a time, really. It’s not that long at all.
A thousand years ago, it was the time of the Early Middle Ages, a time just after Charlemagne, a time of horse-mounted, armor-clad soldiers, the Royal Court, and counts and dukes. It was about 200 hundred years before the official Holy Roman Empire was created.
Yet, even in that time, the people in the pre-Renaissance Middle Ages of 1000 Anno Domini were still pretty much people. Our culture has changed. Our technology has changed. And, most certainly, our lifestyles have changed. But we’re still people, with all the amazing wonders and incredible weaknesses that come with being human.
So, presuming we don’t blow ourselves up, write buggy code that knocks us back into the stone age, or get invaded by Vulcans or the Centauri Republic, we’ll still be people in 3000 A.D.
And we’ll probably still have many of the same challenges.
I’m sure those people of 3000 A.D. will all have better bandwidth and cooler toys. But I’m just as sure that men still won’t understand women, that women’ll still love sugar and spice and everything nice, that everyone will love and laugh and play and care and cry. But if we (and they) do it right, the people of Y3K will all be healthier, wealthier, and wiser.
See, we often look back at the good old days. And in some ways, they were good. But we’ve improved ourselves and our race immeasurably over the last thousand years despite the fact that, physically, we’ve evolved relatively minimally. Oh, no question, we’ve fucked up. The Thousand Year Reich sure didn’t make it. Neither did outhouses, zoot suits, and disco.
But, as we glance back over that time, we can also look at our incredible achievements. The flush-toilet, for instance. What a wonderful invention! And Bruce Willis in Armageddon, perhaps the best movie of all time (but that’s probably because I’m partial to the scene where Paris gets squashed). And fajitas. And DVDs. And ice cubes. Ice cubes are cool. These are a few of my favorite things.
However, we can look back and also be proud of the less tangible stuff: kicking a basketball sized object into space and dropping it on another planet; defeating the bad guys; creating rule of law; coexisting, for the most part, successfully; recognizing our mistakes and trying to make good; caring for those who can’t care for themselves; exposing Milli Vanilli for the lip-syncing frauds that they were; and, of course, creating the Internet.
What can we look forward to as we look ahead? I could turn this into a commercial and tell you that you’ll see many more incredible issues of this magazine and you’ll see many more exceptional magazines from ZATZ:Pure Internet Publishing. But I won’t. (OK, I did, but I just told you what I could’ve told you. It’s not as shameless this way.)
Seriously though, I think and I hope that as we look to the future, we have much to look forward to. For the most part, we’ve turned out to be a pretty good bunch of creatures. The majority of us get along pretty well and do pretty fine things.
And, once in a while, we do some absolutely jaw-dropping, historically unbelievable, mind-bogglingly incredible things. These are the things that make us proud to be part of the human race. These are the creations of incredible beauty, the achievements of astounding engineering, the acts of incredible bravery, the feats of unimaginable fortitude.
These are the things that blow our minds and ignite our imaginations. And we have another thousand years to look forward to. Ain’t it grand?
I’ll see you in the next millennium! Remember, as I write this, it’s the old millenium. When you read it, it’ll be the new millenium. My words have carried over a millenium. If that don’t sound pompous as all heck. Yet it’s so cool!
Party on, dudes and be excellent to each other!
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.H1 Product availability and resources
To read up on Karen Carpenter, and for more song lyrics, you might want to check out this fan site at http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/dononeness/music1/.
For more information on the Milli Vanilli scandal that rocked the ’80s, check out http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/6448/milli.html.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO David Gewirtz is Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of ZATZ: Pure Internet Publishing. With the fine ZATZ team, he publishes PalmPower, DominoPower, and Windows CE Power Magazines. He’s also the author of The Flexible Enterprise and Lotus Notes Revealed! He can be reached via email at david@zatz.com.
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6dc81
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