February 23, 2004
WERE WE THAT STUPID?
Do you realize that it was four years or so ago when you, and many of your fellow citizens, were seriously concerned about the end of our world?
- The new century was approaching day-by- day and each new morning thousands of people were filled with anew with fears of the disaster which would most certainly befall mankind with the coming of the 2lst Century. Many placed their fear on the back of the computers which had so recenlty come to control much of our movement and thought. Many individuals predicted. quite seriously, that our financial world would fall into ruin because the computers in our banks and in our industrial plants could not tell tell one century from another. Or, others thought that ignorant men and women had programmed the computers incorrecty to deal with the future and that things would go to pot overnight once the century ended. I remember one case in which a demonic individual was said to have set it all up that way so hat he could take ove the world as a hacker-dictator of some sort and put Adolph Hitler and his type to shame forever.
It all sounds so silly now, doesn't it? Just a few years later we laugh about it and marvel that people could have been so stupid. Of course, we did not believe any such things, did we? Others did so, but not us. Only unthinking, unstudied, uneduated people would fall for such foolishness, we say.
The same sort of non-think fantasies happened in the prime days of radio when thousands of people from all over the nation ,in various educational and social levels, ran wild before the dramatic presenttioan of Orson Wells's play "Other Worlds". " Millions", we like to say, were conviced the events were takong place a t that moment. The Earth was being invaded by demonic space creatures and machines...but more people than we like to admit went to some pretty far-out extremes because of their misjudgment. One couple in southwestern Virgnia went outside, I remember, and took axes to their radio antenna poles, because they understood that the aliens were coming into even such remote loations as theirs by means of radio wave travel.
There is one case I would like to check out. in particular. Though much the yezar oi 199 systematically invested every cent he could beg, borrow or otherwise acquire, in stocking his mountain side home as a fortress against the arrival - sure and certain - of a re-poackaged disaster such a nature and magnitude tghat man had never known before. He installed underground passageways which he filled with stocks of such essentials as fuel oil, gasoline, batteries, spring water, favorite beverages and canned goods and other foods storable in his location. I have ofen wndered what he did with all that stuff when the disaster did not happen as he had scheduled it to do with the New Year. He has certain shown his face again after all that frenzied prepartion
.
It could be, of course, that he has, by this time, made a small fortune by selling off the entire stock and could cash in on mankind's natural tendency to be careless about such things. Or, he may even have moved on to Richmond or Washigton, D.C. where men of such superior forsight and managment skills are much in demand in governing circles.
A.L.M. February 23, 2004 [c487wds]
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