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Subject: 
        Millennial Paranoia
   Date: 
        Tue, 21 Mar 2000 15:59:37 PST
   From: 
        "Mark Gilley" 
 
The Reality Behind the Fear

When the clock rolled over from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000, a 
crisis came in the fears, hopes, and expectations of a whole world, and 
particularly of our culture.

The fear of a technological breakdown (Y2K) was a thinly-disguised fear of 
something else.  And a recent finding in the Commercial Appeal shed light on 
what that something else might be.

President Clinton's "Don't ask--Don't tell" policy on gays in the military 
has drawn a lot of really contemptuous flak, but it is nothing more than an 
official acknowledgment of a policy already in place.  Gays DO enter the 
military and havge done so for a long time.  Their presence is ignored so 
long as they don't harass other soldiers.

There is an abiding Puritanism in American thought, a clinging to the old 
ways even when they can no longer pretend to be the best ways.
Only a few years ago, people sold bumper stickers that read: "Send the 
President back to Arkansas--and Send her Husband With Her."  Such has been 
the reaction of many to an uppity woman who just won't stay in the kitchen.

A little over a century ago, women in America could not vote and had no 
access to public education.  "What in the world would THEY need it for?" was 
the common reaction to the idea of women's schools, and "coeducation"--that 
was just an invitation to license and promiscuity.

For nearly two thousand years, the Catholic church has been the source of 
our Western concepts of morality and ideals of human conduct.  According to 
the Catholic church, no woman should ever become a priest (Note that this 
violates early Christian practice.  In the earliest Christian groups, women 
and men shared church offices equally.)  Also according to the Catholic 
church, priests had to be celibate.  That is, they had to deny their 
sexuality.  Also, sex was defined as the act between a woman and a man that 
could produce children; moreover, sex was decreed to be evil, a failing of 
the flesh.  As if this weren't enough to swallow, other pleasurable acts 
between human beings not fitting into the definition of procreation  were  
decreed to be still more evil.

Now ask yourself.  What is the easiest way to get a man to obsess about 
sexuality?

Your three seconds are up.  The best way is to refuse him a sexual outlet.  
So, for two thousand years, the church that has set our standards has put 
men obsessed with sex in the position of dispensing moral instruction to the 
rest of us.

The Commercial Appeal article already referred to has shown that the 
incidence of AIDS in the Catholic priesthood of America is four times that 
of the general population.  Now let me guess.  They share needles, right?

Don't think so.

The end of the world, feared to occur in 2000, symbolizes the fact that the 
old world already HAS ended.

Women have never been inferior to men.

The morality of characters in the Bible is no whit superior to that of 
people today.

Gays are no better nor worse than anyone else.  As such they are eligible to 
be priests, and of course to receive the sacrament of marriage as well.  The 
de facto situation ought to become the acknowledged one.

The cold war is over, and the enormous security establishment built up over 
fifty years at such terrible cost in money and repression must be replaced 
by a streamlined standing army and sophisticated economic pressure.  The 
"peace dividend" must go to pay off the national debt and to fund national 
health insurance.

The Caucasian race (actually a mixed genetic strain) has no monopoly on 
accomplishment or creativity.

The world IS one big global village.  THAT is the reality behind the rumors 
of the dreaded "New World Order."

The dread of the new millennium is in truth no more than a collective dread 
of these changes in thinking, and the vision of the Apocalypse, the ravings 
of a religiomaniac set down over two thousand years ago, is embraced by many 
as preferable to joining the world of the year 2000, when armies have no 
reason to exist, the cold war is over, women are every bit the equals of 
men, national boundaries are no more than vestiges, and we Americans are 
going to have to find a way to maintain our own standard of living while 
sharing it with the rest of the world.

Sex IS a normal human drive, nothing to be ashamed of.

We DO live in one big world, not small bounded areas where we can afford to 
ignore what goes on elsewhere.

A woman DOES have the right to bear or not to bear a fetus she carries 
before the second trimester.

Private citizens no more need firearms to walk the streets than they need 
swords or armor.  The only reason to own a gun is to kill somebody.

Welcome to the new millennium.

---Mark Gilley
3/21/2000
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