In the Year Two Thousand

Y2K is falling! Y2K is falling!

The Chicken Littles now wear suits and are on TV.

Everyone from network newscasters to local survivalists is decrying the coming collapse of civilization because of the date change. "Be sure to have flashlights, batteries, and plenty of fresh water on hand," warns an ABC news maven – no one is addressing the important issues: Where’s all the stuff we were promised when I was a kid?

Growing up in the ’50s, Year 2000 was supposed to bring with it all of the cool stuff foretold on science fiction magazine covers and in comic books. By next year, according to predictions, everyone would be zipping around in flying cars; living under the benign one-world governing computer; wearing plastic clothes; and taking our meals by pill.

The last time I looked, none of this stuff was happening as anticipated.

The promise of flying cars is one forecast I’m happy didn’t come true. It takes the might of the federal government to keep airliners from racing around the skies like fevered James Deans. What would the skies be like if everyone from testosterone-fueled teens to blue-haired grannies took out their road rage at 500 miles an hour over your head?

Today [yes, it's 2003 when I'm posting this], if your old-fashioned ground car runs out of gas, you just pull over. If the proposed Jetstonmobile used up its Plutonium Q-35 Space Juice, it would level a suburban development. Fender benders would mean bumpers dropping from the sky. No thanks.

Instead, we’ve got Interstates, and they are a wonderment. As a kid, my family used to make the trek from Cleveland to Kansas each summer to visit relatives. Two full days of two-lane driving on roads with no edge lines. What were laughably called highways guided you through the center of every hamlet from the rush hours of St. Louis to the speed traps of Bucksnort. Today, even with the sorry state of repair of some interstate highways, you can make my childhood trip in hours instead of days.

While Status Assault Vehicles – excuse me, SUVs – may be the latest automotive fad, check out the Firebird and Corvette. These are the cars of the future they showed me on the cover of Astounding Science Fiction.

The One-World Government has snuck up on us, and we’re it. A terribly chauvinistic viewpoint, but who runs the world? We do. Wall Street has a sniffle and the rest of the world economies come down with Ebola. We stop buying stuff, and warehouses from China to Guatemala fill with unsold commodities no one else on earth is crazy enough to buy. There’s no country that can create a world-wide threat anymore. If there were, we would – in the words of that ever-resourceful diplomat, J.R. Ewing – fix their wagon, but good. And, if you believe National Public Radio news accounts, the U.S. is always at the bottom of every malfeasance on the face of the Earth.

We’re just lucky that society isn’t run by a computer. If everyday life worked like Microsoft Windows, we’d all have strokes several times a day and fall into comas, with electroshock the only recourse to being revived. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating, but there is not doubt we’re a computerized society.

There isn’t a single massive mainframe guiding our lives, but try enjoying life without computers: you’d have to live like Theodore Kaczynski. Computers suffuse our lives. Even if you don’t own a desktop model – and that’s now only a third of the population – they’re in everything from washing machines to hotel doorknobs.

One of the predictions that did come true was the universal information service. Instead of Isaac Asimov’s Multivac, we have the Internet. For twenty bucks a month, or less, you can hook into its vast information resource that can damn-near answer any question you Google it. Unfortunately, it’s ocean of knowledge an inch deep. A Google of "stamps" results in 19,552,214 citations. Sadly, most of the locations are the equivalent of : "Golly, I sure like RED!!!! stamps. And anyone who don’t is a DUMMYHEAD!!" Those are probably from the Geocities and Angelfire pages.

There is a lot of valuable knowledge on the Internet, but as science fiction writer and computer columnist Jerry Pournelle half-jokingly says, "The Internet is a conspiracy to see how many grown people can be made to stare at screens on which nothing is happening."

Y2K fashions were always fun when portrayed in pictures or films – see above. Men would be wearing helmets with pointy visors that coordinated with their leotards and tunics. Woman would be wearing skintight pastels with diaphanous accouterments. Footwear would either be knee-high boots or ballet slippers – for both sexes. And all of these would be made of plastic. Well, they got the plastic right.

Polyester burst on the fashion world in the ’70s and faded nearly as quickly. Sure, it couldn’t be stained or worn out or wrinkled, but we found that it just didn’t look right. Cotton and other natural fabrics are back, except for guys in the 70s who still wear those plaid polyester trousers in colors found only in LSD visions. "I’m going to wear them until they wear out." Tragically, they never will.

Polyester had made a stealthy comeback in the form of microfiber polyester and I have to say I like it.

As far as food by pill in Y2K, we probably won’t ever get there. Not until swallowing a One-A-Day gives you the same sensuous experience as eating a two-inch-thick porterhouse. We’ve become a nation intent on eating from both extremes of the spectrum: munching a Milky Way and chasing it with a Diet Coke.

A dietary trend that was only hinted at mid-century has changed our lives: Fast Food. It’s possible to a hot, prepared meal at nearly any time. Just finished placing your 10-cent-a-minute call to Ralph 424C41+ on Ganymede and looking for a nosh at 2 a.m.? There’s a Burger King down the block where you can get a sack of cow and fries without leaving your car. Try that in your flying-mobile. Now if they could only enhance speaker technology.