IP: " Will Y2K usher in TEOTWAWKI?"

[Vladimir Z. Nuri]

From: believer at telepath.com
Subject: IP: " Will Y2K usher in TEOTWAWKI?"
Date: Wed, 09 Sep 1998 12:49:38 -0500
To: believer at 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
-----------------------
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-----------------------




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