Remember the fears over the Y2K?
That is how this decade started out. I was living in Takoma Park, Md., at the time, and I remember purposefully filling my car with gas before driving the family over to my sister's house in Vienna, Va., early on New Year's Eve night, 1999.
Rumors and reports of impending disaster had been circulating for months, and those given to apocalyptic visions were hunkered down, awaiting the inevitable.
But it never happened.
Having quite a few engineer friends, I considered the prospect of a global Internet failure remote, but I filled up that car anyway, just in case.
Where exactly I was thinking of taking my young family to escape whatever horrors might have ensued a Y2K disaster now eludes my faltering memory. Probably getting to my sister's house was as safe a haven as I could have imagined.
After all, thanks to my nephew, they had the best toy gun arsenal I had witnessed up until that time.
***
It's good to be able to sit up and walk around tonight, after a pinched nerve laid me low over the weekend, after our 1,000+ road trip through Arizona last week.
But I'm blessed by a body that (still) recovers quickly, and by tomorrow sometime, I should be back to normal.
***
A much more shocking event than any Y2K scenario awaited America as the decade, century and millenium pivoted, of course, and that was to occur on September 11th, 2001.
The Bush administration had every piece of information it needed to have to be able to recognize the magnitude of the threat from al-Qaeda, but the record shows they ignored all of it.
Nevertheless, once hit, this country came together and started striking back.
That is the problem. We reacted like the hurt monster we, in fact, were, and still are. We struck out at the people we perceived as our enemies.
Eight years later, tomorrow night President Obama will announce a troop "surge" of 30,000 young men and women who will lay their lives on the line in Afghanistan.
Remember, I know Afghanistan.
I'll listen to his arguments, but for me, and for many others, he has a skeptical audience to convince this is the wisest course at this point in our troubled history.
-30-
1 comment:
I do remember the threat of y2k- I was in Ghana at the time...and when we were told of the things to expect- electric outages, no water, no internet...oh my, we realized we had been living that way all the while - so for us there was no threat. :)
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