By LEE N. HOWELL
Politically Speaking

Most of us “baby boomers” probably never thought we would make it through 1984, much less see the dawning of the new millennium.

After all, we all knew that Big Brother was watching us — and we also knew that he had his finger on the button that unleashed The Bomb.

For us, who lived through the political chess game known as the Cold War, nuclear war was not only not unthinkable: It was expected in our lifetime.

We knew that the two supper-powers would eventually unleash their missiles on each other, as surely as those of us raised in the Bible Belt knew that the Second Coming of Jesus would probably occur in our lifetimes.

Why, when we were just entering high school — and still hitching rides from our older siblings because we had not yet passed the magic age when we got our licenses to drive — we watched as the world teetered and tottered toward the brink of nuclear extinction during what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So, most of us certainly never expected to see the century turn and that mythical time known as the Year 2000 become a reality.

But, it is almost here — and most of us “baby boomers” are still here to see it.

Obviously, if we had stopped to think back then and do a little math, we would have realized — as any insurance agent's mortality tables would have revealed — that even the first-born members of our generation would only be entering their 50s and our youngest brothers and sisters might just be becoming established in their careers and beginning their families.

But, back when we were in college, the turn of the century seemed so far in the future that none of us worried much about whether we would live to see it or not.

(Our parents often wondered if we worried about anything — and, indeed, one of the posters many of us use to used to keep on our my bedroom walls portrayed a shaggy-haired, snaggle-toothed young man whose slogan was, “What? Me Worry?”)

Back then, one of our generation's favorite “cult” movies was “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and we all believed that by the time that magic date was reached, space travel really would be commonplace, Corporate America would have learned some way to make a profit off of it, and our computers would have become so smart that they were dangerous.

Well, those far-in-the-future dates — whether they came from the title of a popular book or of a movie — have now come and gone or are almost here.

And, despite all the progress we have made, we are not as far ahead of where we were as our literary prophets forecast, nor as many of us naively expected us to be.

So, now we find ourselves living in that mystery-shrouded future we all dreamed of — or dreaded — and we have found that it is not all that different from the world in which we were born and bred.

In the early days of television, Walter Cronkite used to narrate a dramatic show called “You Are There” which attempted to portray historic events as if they were being covered live by a television news crew for the evening broadcast.

And, he would end every show with the same words: “What kind of day was it? A day like every other day — and you were there.”

The same could be said of the future we faced that has now arrived.

As the Third Millennium dawns, there are probably more than a few of us aging “baby boomers” who might want to dig through our closets, find our old out-of-tune guitars, and look for the words to that plaintive old Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?”

[Lee N. Howell is an award-winning writer who has been observing politics and society in the Southern Crescent, the state, and nation for more than a quarter of a century.]

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