Y2K Revisited`

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.