The new millennium began in fear
when the calendar turned from nines
to zeroes, afraid the technology of
the age
couldn’t subtract from 2000 and get
a positive number
and everything would cease to
function, the world
would shut down, so we stocked up
on water and fuel
and hoarded our cash, pulled it
from the banks,
“just in case.” We laughed at
ourselves, but deep
down inside us, we knew life as we
knew it
was about to end, regressing beyond
our abilities
to survive, so dependent had we
become.
But in that millennium moving
behind us, we had survived
two World Wars and numerous skirmishes
in Korea and Vietnam,
in Panama and Granada, Cuba even on
the brink of a nuclear war,
and survived a host of other countries
in disarray around the globe;
and the social walls of humanity
were now crumbling;
what wasn’t talked about became conversation
now, sex
and same sex relationships and sex before
and outside
of marriage, living together vs.
the institute of marriage
preached at us, and gender was
becoming a fluid process
where we could choose to identify
as we wished.
Even the rigid lines set by white
men for social norms were crossed,
blacks and whites and Asians and
Latinos, men and women,
gay and straight, Catholic,
Protestant, Jew and Muslim,
coming together, more equal, “all
men created equal,” free, finally,
as was taught to us, promised to
us, all these changes creating
a new hope that this next
millennium would bring us understanding
and harmony, peace and progress
toward a bright future.
But Y2K didn’t happen as we feared it
would; we had survived and moved
now into 2000, into a new
millennium of change, a new millennium of hope.
Millennials, growing up in this new
time, youth embracing
that change, and a new generation
was born of them,
more open, more vocal, more
prepared for the future,
a future far different from their
parents, different from a generation
slow to change, slow to embrace this
new age, to forego their past,
their old views and attitudes and
the comfortable, safe, ways they had lived.
Sadly, those boomers and Gen X’ers brought
with them
their same old fears and their lust
and greed, their need for power,
one-upmanship, money and power
equaling success, every
man for himself, claiming
superiority of wealth and race and gender,
religion and political party, a
country’s old regime of fear and hatred,
warring against its neighbors, man
fighting to get what he can for himself,
fighting for control, trying to
stop what was destined to happen over time,
establishing rules and laws, unable
to concede to these changes, guided by fear,
afraid of not fitting in, unable to
accept himself as irrelevant, a relic
from an earlier time, an ancient
time, old, and in the way of moving forward
to where this old world is headed
in this new millennium of rapid change.
It’s long past time now to put to
rest that past, those fears, the hatred,
the ego, the old lust and greed and
anger, outdated now, destructive;
it’s time now to give change a
chance, life itself and humanity,
and peace, one people in this new
age, Y2K beginning
and moving forward, progress,
toward another thousand years.
