Wednesday, January 5, 1999
Wednesday, January 5, 1999 |
| Musings
on a new century By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE So. We've passed through a sort of portal, like the time warp of science fiction films (think “Final Countdown”). Even if we stayed up until midnight, didn't it seem as though we went to bed in one century and woke up in the next? We've moved from the past to the future, from the old to the new, from a sense of some security, some familiarity, to the largely unknown. Into a Brave New World, perhaps. Or the Land of Oz. It's a scary place. The fear of Y2K disasters proved unfounded, although I tend to agree with those that say the dangers were real indeed, and that good planning and preventive medicine kept any computer glitches from wreaking serious mischief. I've written before about my musings as a child, when I did the math almost everyone has done at some point in their life, and discovered I'd be 63 years old when the year 2000 began. Sixty-three years old! What a tragedy, I thought, to live through such a momentous event and be too old to know what was going on! How sad that I would probably sleep through it, or weakly blow a whistle from the confines of my rocking chair. What a pity not to be out partying with the rest of the world. I'd like to shake that child and her pathetic vision of the person I am today. She couldn't believe I wouldn't be decrepit at this age, but in fact, I feel exactly as I did at 30, give or take an occasional tinge in knees and back, and some holiday-generated lumpiness. (Admittedly, I was not out carousing Friday night, unless you count a rip-roaring progressive dinner right here in town with nine other couples from church.) Much has been said this past week about the changes this century has brought to ordinary people's lives. Most have been in technology; some, thank God, at least in the United States, have been in ways we behave toward others across lines of race, social status, religion and gender. I'm old enough to marvel at changes I've seen in my own lifetime. Here are a few of my favorites, most of which I haven't heard mentioned during the obligatory century-end summing up of advances: ” The interstate highway system. That may surprise you, given my passion for devising ways that will let us give up our cars. But if you remember the terrible danger of two- and four-lane roads and passing lanes, the real labor it used to be to drive through mountains like Pennsylvania's, you'll understand when I say that the interstates opened this country to ordinary people, made accessible its beauty, made possible family visits that were once out of the question. ” The Salk vaccine and antibiotics. We were among the first parents who didn't have to agonize about our kids being maimed or killed by polio as our parents did. ” No smoking. I wouldn't have dreamed even 20 years ago that smoking would be banned from most public places in my lifetime. ” Television. This oft-maligned tool is like any other, with potential for good and for evil. I regret the homogenization, the blurring of regional distinctions I think TV has effected, and I blame mindless hours in front of the tube for much of our national dumbing down. Nonetheless, I celebrate the global community it has helped create — never more beautifully than just this last week, when we shared the wonder of a new millennium with people on a beach in Kiribati, at St. Basil's in Moscow, at the South Pole, in front of the Acropolis, beside a remote bay in Newfoundland, along the Seine and the Thames, in Derry, and among the pyramids. ” Credit cards (for that matter, any magnetically encoded cards that open doors, check out library books, pay for telephone calls, and do so many tasks with a single swipe.) I can't imagine my own parents using credit cards: Being in debt, even for a month, was simply not an option. ” The Internet and personal computers. You knew I'd include these. What bridges they build! How small they've shrunk the world, and how wondrously they've helped knit together families and friends with instantaneous communication that once took months to exchange! On Sunday the preacher said, “Those who awaited the arrival of the second millennium, even those who watched as 1899 became 1900, had fears of their own. They could not imagine that at the end of the second millennium, their descendants would be worrying about a computer bug. They couldn't even have imagined a computer.” Nor could they have imagined doctors looking into human bodies and excising tissue without a knife; that we could read a newspaper printed in Singapore before it was on the streets; seeing galaxies 50 million light years away by means of an orbiting telescope. Which raises an interesting question. What will worry our children's grandchildren most about the next century? We can easily imagine warfare, trips to Mars, long-distance medicine, maybe time travel — these are all extensions of things we already know. But what capabilities will our descendants have that are as far beyond our imagining as many of our commonplace tools would have been beyond the comprehension of our forebears? The future is a scary place. And there's no going back.
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