it's 1999 at the moment, & every day a few more people go completely chicken little. it's a trend that only promises to increase in the coming 9-10 months.

yes, the year 2000, the old mm, is next year. or at least it will be when it gets here... which some people think won't happen. but oh it will, just like any other year. just like 1 thousand did, and zero thousand, & negative one thousand before that. seriously, if the world were going to end on a millennium, why two thousand? one thousand is even rounder, making it a far more logical choice. & since at this time there is no evidence that the world ended in 1000 ce, i doubt it'll happen now either.

besides, it's incredibly vain to think that the world would end on your calendar, anyway. not everyone goes by the same calendar; in fact it's probably not 1999 in more places than it is. so how come our 2000 is so much better than anyone else's? if there were ancient prophecies that declared apocalypse at 2000 (& i don't know if there were; i don't have the time to keep track of every nut who's ever predicted anything) then you can bet that when they were made, a different calendar was in use than the one now. that's how calendars work. they change. with every jesus or caesar who thinks himself good enough for his own counter reset, how can any of them be valid?

one major excuse to dive into premillennial paranoia has been the legendary "year 2000 bug". it seems that since people everywhere have been too lazy to upgrade their systems since the '60s, not all computers are year-2000 compliant. the economy will crash! they say. it will be chaos in the streets! everything'll shut down!

whatever. while a major inconvenience, everyone with a brain has been working for years to make their networks compliant. maybe not everyone will. if so, certain services might fail. but no judgment day here. the lost services will be replaced. that's the nature of capitalism, love it or loathe it. i'm not saying it'll be perfectly comfortable; there conceivably could be minor losses. but we'll manage.

it all reminds me of the '50s, when everyone had a bomb shelter in their backyard. but even then, as utterly brainwashed as they were, at least the paranoiacs had some enemy to fear. the fear might've been solely driven by lies & propaganda, but at least they were based on something real: big bombs. now people seem to be grasping at straws for something to be scared of. like back in '90 when "the big one" was supposed to swallow the midwest in a feat of earthshaking hunger on one specific day in january. but come the next day, what was in the papers? no earthshaker. there was not a whole lot of shaking going on around here.

i'll tell you, i've broken chain letters & i've continued them. all of them promised luck in love. but the ones i sent on never brought me so much as a held hand, & the ones i forgot didn't seem to put a dent in the losing streak i'd already established long before. it's just superstition, & so's waiting for the world to end. get over it.