iht.com
Paris, Wednesday, November 4, 1998
Head for the Hills in 2000?
By Neal R. Peirce The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Planning to head for a cabin in the hills with a stock of dehydrated food, bottled water and your own
gasoline-powered generator?
Or work with your neighbors to set up an emergency shelter, perhaps in a local school or church, where folks could retreat for
warmth, light and food in case grievous emergencies develop?
That is the stark choice that the millennium bug - the prospect of computers
and embedded memory chips, unable to recognize a four-digit year, going haywire on Jan. 1, 2000 - seems to present to some
Americans.
From the people who know computer systems - programmers, engineers, government and business experts - there is now a rising
crescendo of warnings about potentially grave Year 2000 problems.
At best, we can expect isolated equipment failures - traffic lights malfunctioning or short-term local power blackouts, for example.
But wholesale breakdowns could well occur: longer electrical, gas and water supply cutoffs, telephone systems inoperative, fuel and
heating oil shortages, failed rail and trucking networks, making it impossible for supermarkets to restock their shelves.
The impact at the grass roots, in Americans' everyday lives, could be profound.
In the words of Michael Hyatt, author of ''The Millennium Bug'': ''In previous generations, emergency preparedness was a way of life.
No one was seduced by the 'myth of continuity'; everyone assumed that life would be periodically interrupted by crises. But many of
us - particularly those of us who are baby boomers - have never really had to face a widespread social crisis. War, famine and
pestilence are outside Americans' realm of firsthand experience.''
When he was a boy in rural Nebraska, Mr. Hyatt recalls, people had a storm shelter and a pantry for protection against tornadoes
and severe blizzards. And neighbor was always ready to help neighbor.
Yet now news reports indicate a growing body of Year 2000 survivalists, people laying in supplies of fuel and canned food and
generators, planning to retreat into their homes - or to cabins in the woods.
It is an alarming trend, suggests my colleague Curtis Johnson, chairman of the Metropolitan Council in Minneapolis-St. Paul: ''If this
event drives us into deeper behavior of individualism, if our mentality is that every house is its own ''Y2K'' fortress and my neighbor
be damned, it will be as serious a calamity as any technological failure.''
The heartening news is that from the grass roots up, hundreds of local groups are already organizing to raise Y2K awareness and
explore how whole communities can collaborate to weather a period of severe crisis.
The Denver-based Cassandra Project, one of dozens of Y2K Internet sites, is a national clearinghouse focused on community
preparedness rather than individual survivalism. Its Web site (www.millennia-bcs.com) has had more than 1 million hits.
''The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation?'' is the title of three futurists' views of perils and possibilities
(www.angelfire.com/California/rhomer/social.html). Americans of all ages and experience, they write, need to undertake community
audits of potential problems and contingencies to deal with each potential loss of service, from utilities to food supplies, public
safety to health care.
Indeed, this potential calamity could have the dividend of bringing people together in neighborhoods where few residents currently
even know each other.
But we need to get specific fast about an emergency shelter for every community - and it ought to be schools, suggests Douglass
Carmichael, a leading Year 2000 consultant. The federal and state governments, he says, should quickly appropriate funds and
press to make sure schools can provide water, food and a warm space through the winter of 2000.
One reason: Schools - as with hurricanes or floods - are a familiar emergency location in American culture.
Mr. Carmichael proposes rapid steps to authorize National Guard or other military help to get the schools ready.
The president, Mr. Carmichael argues, has to take the lead, telling Americans that there is potential for serious trouble, and people
need to be prepared for the worst.
Only with presidential leadership, Mr. Carmichael asserts, will Americans take Y2K seriously enough soon enough to avert ''massive
hoarding'' as an increasingly panicky middle class, each family buying for itself, drives up generator, food and fuel prices, triggering
shortages and even opening prospects of class warfare.
One is brought up short by such ideas. Can all this be serious? Check the frivolous entertainment clogging television channels, look
at the media's political coverage obsessed with posturing and the potential of presidential impeachment, and you might think you
lived on a different planet.
But the people trying to focus us on Y2K perils are not nut cases. They are serious technical, business, government leaders.
Americans ignore at their peril their alert to potential civic disruption and disorder.
Clear national leadership and vigorous grassroots initiatives are not strangers to America. In World War II, both functioned superbly.
The challenge now, in an incredibly limited time, is to gain Americans' attention - and commitment.
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