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Forum: Y2K on Maple Street It's not malfunctioning computers that will worry Chad Hermann on New Year's Eve - it's malfunctioning human beings. Can we all keep our heads? Sunday, March 14, 1999
I'm not hoarding food or water, not stockpiling provisions, not squirreling away canned goods and distilled liquids for the turn of what seems like everything: the year, the century, the millennium, the sanity of strangers. I have no plan to purchase a battery-powered radio or a gas-powered generator or a shotgun with plenty of ammo to fend off the looters or the Four Horsemen or the foot soldiers from FEMA.
I plan to spend New Year's Eve 1999 the way I've spent the last few: with my wife and son, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law and niece, and precious little fanfare. We'll eat spinach dip and drink beer and play with the kids' Christmas toys and then, with a few minutes to spare, we'll pop some Champagne and gather round the television, waiting for the big dumb ball to drop, as it does every year, on a whole lot of nothing.
I've had enough of Armageddon already.
Too many people out there, most of them closing their minds and opening their Web browsers, trading doomsday scenarios like secret Internet recipes, are no doubt laughing at my ignorance, nattering over my naiveté, shaking their heads at me the way my mother used to when she thought she knew better than I. (Of course, she usually did.)
I've heard the horror stories about crippled cars, AND this country turned into one big junkyard nation. But I've also heard a local mechanic, whose life's work is to know the insides of cars, tell me that it's all a load of bull, that my car won't care any more than my sofa what millennium it is. I've heard and read and seen other people, local and national, each in their own areas of expertise, debunk one crisis after another.
I extrapolate. And I figure that every discipline boasts spokespersons who, putting theory to practice, comparing the dim bulb of paranoia to the hard light of truth, could undercut any idea e-mailed their way.
I, for one, have faith in qualified experts. And I refuse to succumb to unqualified fears.
I believe in the electric company (yes, even Duquesne Light), the gas company, the water and sewer authority. I believe in the airlines and their abilities, if only to protect profits and public relations, to ensure that their planes don't fall on our unsuspecting, Dick-Clark-watching heads. I believe that companies and corporations, economic entities large and small, here, there, and everywhere, will understand how unwise they would be to welcome consumers to the millennium by paralyzing their lives.
I'm not worried about cars or computers, planes or power outages. I'm worried about people.
The people under the stairs and in the bunkers, hyped up and hunkered down, so certainly certain we're doomed because of a nice, round number on a cultural calendar. The people who think every voice of Y2K reason and reassurance is merely part of some great conspiratorial spin, angling to keep us in the dark until the big darkness comes. The ones stockpiling food. Especially the ones stockpiling ammo.
As the first few months of 1999 roll on, as the Y2K frenzy only begins to foment, those people and their potential reactions remind me of a lesson my mother taught me long ago. One summer evening, she suggested I read "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," a teleplay from "The Twilight Zone." It frightened me to my marrow. Because even at age 10, I understood the moral and valued the lesson, ones from which the doubting, scrambling survivalists would surely benefit.
One afternoon on Maple Street, the power fails. At first, neighbors talk, help, support each other. But as darkness falls, they grow uneasy.
One man judges another ("He always was an oddball"). Neighbors take sides. Tensions rise and tempers flare. Weapons appear. Then it all falls apart.
A shadowy figure approaches. Shots ring out. The figure, a neighbor returning from a walk, falls dead. "I was only trying to protect my home!" the gunman cries. The crowd turns on the gunman, then on itself.
As chaos reigns and good people run mad on Maple Street, two eerily rational aliens survey the scene. One observes: "Understand . . . now? Just stop a few of their machines, throw them into darkness for a few hours, then sit back and watch the pattern . . . Their world is full of Maple Streets. We'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other. One to the other. One to the other . . ." That thought seems endlessly to repeat, both a warning and a lamentation.
That pattern could play itself out on the Maple Streets of Western Pennsylvania. I see the frenzy of mid-December, crowded streets and empty shelves, mad rushes on food and water and money. I see grocery store fistfights, MAC machine maimings, people expecting, even perversely hoping for, an apocalypse: a self-fulfilling, self-defeating prophecy.
Or I see the confusion of early January, when problems might arise for a few hours, public utility hiccups mistaken for last gasps. I see survivalists rushing, running, shooting, compelled to act without the slightest, simplest purpose. I see people starting to act but not stopping to think, lost and groping in their own myopic hysteria, blinding themselves all the more.
And I hear one of Maple Street's besieged, thirty-five years before the Y2K monsters were due, plaintively wailing, "Won't somebody think a thought around here?" Though I don't hear anyone answer. I hear only Rod Serling's final narration: "The pity of it is, these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone."
But despite my fears about the fearing, I know better.
Last summer, when wicked thunderstorms and tornadoes tore through town, we confined them. We handled it all - with the possible exception of the intersection of Fifth and Negley, where carmageddon reigned at rush hour - with absolute calm and ease. We greeted each other in the streets, on the sidewalks, and shook our heads over the weather. We laughed. We lit lots of candles. We didn't shoot anyone.
We were, for those few days, no Maple Street. We saw no monsters. We became no monsters.
So suppose we lose power for a while next January. The sun will rise and fall and rise again. We can wear extra clothing and throw more blankets on our beds. We can bask in the quiet. And we can tough it out like the pioneers, with no cable, no microwave, and only three hours left on our laptop batteries. I suspect we'll survive.
Because the world won't end if we lose our lights. Only if we lose our minds.
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