If the look and tone of this issue seem a bit dark, it's because the subject matter is even darker.
That's not to say that I take the millennium itself all that seriously. In fact, it reminds me of nothing so much as peering over the front seat of the old family car as a boy, watching the nines gather across the odometer and waiting for the zeros to come sweeping down. Only in this case, it's the whole Western world tooling along in the family car, waiting for the numbers to roll over.
And not everyone agrees that the new millennium will have arrived when the odometer hits 2000. Long ago, somebody began this arbitrary tally with the Year One instead of the Year Zero; therefore--according to the Great Millennial Quibble--the new millennium won't begin until 2001. I'm not impressed. What matters to us odometer watchers isn't the miles; it's the number with the zeros.
My point is this: if you're looking for tangible significance in the coming of the new millennium, you're probably out of luck. Like the meaning of most events in our lives, it has only that which we give it. That, however, can be a lot. For those of us who still think the year 1970 has a futuristic ring, the year 2000 is loaded with meaning. It means we've survived the Present and the Near Future and will live the rest of our lives in the Distant Future, a place I know from science fiction novels I read as a child.
And then, for most of us, I think the word "millennium" itself carries distinctly apocalyptic overtones. If Y1K was a religious event, with expectations of a literal trump of doom, Y2K represents an odd new twist on that old theme. The latest predictions of millennial disaster all bear the imprimatur of legitimate science.
I find it fascinating, for example, that apocalyptic scenarios have been woven around something as limited in scope as the Y2K bug. Clearly, the potential collapse of lots of computer networks has serious implications, but it's a pretty fantastic leap from there to the end of civilization. Maybe we needed something like the Y2K bug as an outlet for our millennial unease.
But if that's the case, there are plenty of other apocalyptic visions to usher us into the new millennium, and most invoke less tractable questions: Will the end of cheap oil be the end of the world as we know it? Could global warming lead to mass starvations? And are such newfound scourges as AIDS and Ebola the earth's immune response kicking in to fight a dangerous infection of human beings?
In this issue, I invite you to join some highly qualified world watchers, who happen to be Pomona faculty or alumni, as they take a look at a planet that is starting to show its mileage in some sobering and even frightening ways. If you think of the millennium as a significant turn of the odometer for this slightly used space vehicle in which we travel around the sun, maybe we ought to be thinking of this not as a time for celebration, but as a good time to check the oil and take a good hard look under the hood. After all, we still have a lot of miles to go--or so we hope.
--Mark Wood
