IP: " Will Y2K usher in TEOTWAWKI?"

From: believer@telepath.com Subject: IP: " Will Y2K usher in TEOTWAWKI?" Date: Wed, 09 Sep 1998 12:49:38 -0500 To: believer@telepath.com Source: Dallas Morning News http://www.dallasnews.com/texas-southwest-nf/tsw1.htm Turn for the worst? 09/06/98 By Victorial Loe Hicks / The Dallas Morning News A CAVE IN ARKANSAS - Will Y2K usher in TEOTWAWKI? Bryan Elder is sure it will - so sure that he'll be deep beneath the ground on Jan. 1, 2000. "As soon as I get a cave, I'm going to live in it," Mr. Elder vowed, wending his way through one Arkansas cavern. "I'll be the world's next caveman." Y2K is the pop-culture moniker for the programming glitch that left millions of computers and other devices unable to recognize dates beyond the year 1999. The disruption will depend on how many faulty mainframes, PCs and microchips - in everything from nuclear plants to VCRs - can be detected and fixed in the next 16 months. Most people regard Y2K with mild to moderate anxiety. But a flourishing subculture insists that it portends nothing less than TEOTWAWKI (tee-OH-tawa-kee): The End of the World as We Know It. "There won't be any accidental survivors," said Mr. Elder, who believes that computer failures will short-circuit the electric grid and the transportation system, fostering severe food shortages and social anarchy. "I'm not afraid of dying," he said. "I'd prefer not to starve to death." His scenario - which also envisions nuclear war, bombardment by asteroids, incineration by solar windstorm, the flip-flop of the North and South poles, an ice age and the second coming of Jesus Christ - is one of the more dramatic, even among Y2K alarmists. But he isn't alone in hunkering down. Merchants of survival goods say business is booming, primarily driven by new customers who are girding for Y2K. Anecdotes abound of city dwellers, including some computer jocks, who are poised to flee to the boonies, where they can store and grow food without having to fend off rapacious neighbors. Dallas systems analyst Steve Watson told Wired magazine that he bought 500 remote Oklahoma acres and several guns after recognizing the full ramifications of the Y2K crisis. Mr. Watson did not respond to interview requests from The Dallas Morning News. A vice president of the firm he works for, DMR Consulting, said Mr. Watson had come to regret his public stance, which "the company doesn't share." But in one respect, every cautionary voice is right. Y2K is absolutely guaranteed to happen. In a mounting wave that will crest powerfully on Jan. 1, 2000, computers will encounter dates in which the two-digit year field reads 00, which "noncompliant" computers will read as 1900. Depending on whether a particular computer needs to know what year it is - to calculate accrued interest, for example, or to track maintenance schedules of industrial machinery - it may go on working normally, produce bad data or simply freeze up. If enough computers fail - say, at banks or telephone companies - the whole country, perhaps the world, could wake up with a whale of a New Year's hangover. By some estimates, industries and governments will spend as much as $600 billion to make things right. Even so, the Gartner Group, a research firm that has studied the issue since 1989, forecasts that half of the companies around the world will experience some disruption of their operations, further sapping an already woozy global economy. Precisely who will get hurt, how badly and for how long is the question - a question impossible to answer. "The uncertainty factor is immense. That's what makes this prophetic material," said Dr. Richard Landes, director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. "Back when I first heard about Y2K, I immediately realized that this would be grist for the apocalyptic prophets' mills." At a vigorous 32, Mr. Elder hardly fits the hoary image of a prophet. A marketing major from the University of Arkansas, he ran his own hydraulic service company until a couple of years ago, when he began devoting himself to studies of biblical prophecies and other spiritual texts. "The angel of death, that's how I feel," he said. He wants urgently for others to heed his warning, to believe, as he does, that anyone who remains above ground faces certain annihilation. Once the power grid goes dark, as he is sure it will, the financial system will collapse, he said. "Then we're back to the barter system and 'How much food do you have?' " That's only a prelude however. On May 5, 2000, Mr. Elder said, most of the planets in the solar system will align themselves on the opposite side of the sun from Earth. That will trigger the solar gales and the asteroid shower, which will precipitate still further catastrophes. "The computer problem will weed out a lot, and the solar wind will get the rest," he said. "The time to prepare is right now." For prepare, read: find a cave. Mr. Elder has his sights on one near Cassville, Mo., that he figures can accommodate 125 people. If he can reach a deal with the present owners, he plans to add plumbing, ventilation, diesel-fired generators, grow lights and enough basic supplies to sustain life for as long as seven years. Everyone will share the costs - $11,743 per person, he calculates. Byron Kirkwood isn't ready to live in a cave, but he does plan to be prepared for Y2K. Which in his case is easy, since he runs a mail-order survival products business from his rural Oklahoma home. He started the company six years ago, after his wife, Annie, said she received messages from the Virgin Mary - which she passed on in a series of books - warning that cataclysmic "earth changes" were imminent. These days, though, most of Mr. Kirkwood's customers are more worried about whether Y2K will cripple the U.S. economy than whether the Earth is about to turn on its side and acquire a second sun. Mrs. Kirkwood said Mary has not explicitly addressed Y2K, although she did warn recently that "major changes . . . will come about through government, banking institutions and telecommunications. Your power sources will be interrupted, and your life will change drastically." "That sure fits Y2K," Mr. Kirkwood said, "but she didn't come right out and say, 'The computers will fail.' " In any case, he said, sales of his survival products are up five-fold over last year, with water filters, hand-cranked radios and long-shelf-life foods leading the list. A rack in his office displays freeze-dried entrees - pepper steak, cheese ravioli and chili - packaged with individual chemical heating units. Some orders have come from as far away as Hong Kong and Austria. Like many Y2K pessimists, he gets much of his information and does much of his business via the Internet - using computers to bewail humankind's impending betrayal by computers. "I'm not trying to be a doomsayer," Mr. Kirkwood said. "I only give TEOTWAWKI a 10 percent chance of happening." However, he said, if food becomes scarce, "there's not enough police, not enough national guard, not enough military to go around." Those who stockpile food, water and cash - or who head for the hills - may look foolish to those who don't, he said, but only time will tell who are the real fools. "Some of us will look stupid one way, or some of us will look stupid the other way," he said. "You just don't know which side of stupid you're going to be on." Although Y2K is a purely technological, secular problem, there is a strong nexus between Y2K anxieties and religious millennialism, which predicts a catastrophic cleansing as the precursor to a new paradise. Like the Kirkwoods and Mr. Elder, the Dallas Area Y2K Community Preparedness Group is overtly Christian. The Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network has extensive Y2K links on its Web site. And Dr. Gary North, whom some regard as the Paul Revere of the Y2K crisis, is prominent in the Religious Reconstruction movement, which advocates replacing the Constitution with biblical law. Dr. North used to live in Tyler, Texas, but he has moved to northern Arkansas, which, like eastern Oklahoma, offers solitude to separatists of various persuasions. "The millennial myth can take secular or religious forms," said Dr. Philip Lamy, a sociologist at Castleton State College in Vermont who studies millennial movements. Regardless of the form, he said, the driving force is angst about today's rapid social change - change as momentous as that experienced during the Industrial Revolution. "What a lot of millennial groups are trying to do is hold onto the past," Dr. Lamy said. "They are merely saying that they're afraid." Of course, fear is not an unreasonable response. "This is not a false issue," said Bill Wachel, a computer consultant who founded DFW Prep 2000, a forum in which industry representatives share information on the issue. "It's possible, yeah, that the whole world could come apart. Is it probable? No." Dr. Leon Kappelman of the University of North Texas is leading the charge for government to pressure crucial industries such as electric utilities, telecommunications and medicine to fix Y2K problems. He isn't anticipating doom, but he doubts that many Americans will escape unscathed. "I don't really know what the future is. I know there are serious risks," he said. "I expect life to be a little more difficult for awhile." He has no use for those who choose to flee. "Cowards would be a good word [for them]," he said. "Deserters." Dr. Landes, too, urges Americans to hang together rather than hang separately. "Y2K can be a gift," he said. "It's a test. How do we as a culture handle this - not only the problem, but the rhetoric surrounding the problem?" As Mr. Elder explored the cave he had chosen to demonstrate to a visitor the wisdom of his plan, he came upon artifacts of a earlier era's doomsday fears. Next to a sign designating the cavern as an official fallout shelter lay tins of 1950s-vintage survival rations. The tins were unopened and pocked with rust. © 1998 The Dallas Morning News ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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