Maybe the concern is not so fanciful. The alarmists might be Chicken Littles, true. But maybe the reassurances we hear are like those issued by the people in charge of the Titanic, so complacent in their belief that their ship was unsinkable. Sometimes, history shows, the sky does fall. My broker says he always bets against extreme scenarios.
Uncertainty seems an appropriate stance here.
It appears that we have built a technological civilization of such complexity that even brilliant people cannot compute with certainty just how all the hidden loci of the Y2K bug, and all the dense links of interconnectedness, will play out when the clock strikes midnight. In the face of ambiguity, as in a Rorschach test, we humans manifest much that warrants our exploring in depth. With that uncertainty, I'd say let's hold both possibilities in our minds and see what we can learn about ourselves, with our capacity and impulse both to imagine nightmares that are not there and to deny painful realities until they engulf us. Andrew Bard Schmookler writes from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Before bookmarking this page in your browser, click here .