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IP: " Will Y2K usher in TEOTWAWKI?"
From: [email protected]
Subject: IP: " Will Y2K usher in TEOTWAWKI?"
Date: Wed, 09 Sep 1998 12:49:38 -0500
To: [email protected]
Source: Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/texas-southwest-nf/tsw1.htm
Turn for the worst?
09/06/98
By Victorial Loe Hicks / The Dallas Morning News
A CAVE IN ARKANSAS - Will Y2K usher in TEOTWAWKI?
Bryan Elder is sure it will - so sure that he'll be deep
beneath the ground on Jan. 1, 2000.
"As soon as I get a cave, I'm going to live in it," Mr.
Elder vowed, wending his way through one
Arkansas cavern. "I'll be the world's next caveman."
Y2K is the pop-culture moniker for the
programming glitch that left millions of computers
and other devices unable to recognize dates beyond
the year 1999. The disruption will depend on how
many faulty mainframes, PCs and microchips - in
everything from nuclear plants to VCRs - can be
detected and fixed in the next 16 months.
Most people regard Y2K with mild to moderate
anxiety. But a flourishing subculture insists that it
portends nothing less than TEOTWAWKI
(tee-OH-tawa-kee): The End of the World as We
Know It.
"There won't be any accidental survivors," said Mr.
Elder, who believes that computer failures will
short-circuit the electric grid and the transportation
system, fostering severe food shortages and social
anarchy.
"I'm not afraid of dying," he said. "I'd prefer not to
starve to death."
His scenario - which also envisions nuclear war,
bombardment by asteroids, incineration by solar
windstorm, the flip-flop of the North and South
poles, an ice age and the second coming of Jesus
Christ - is one of the more dramatic, even among
Y2K alarmists. But he isn't alone in hunkering down.
Merchants of survival goods say business is
booming, primarily driven by new customers who
are girding for Y2K. Anecdotes abound of city
dwellers, including some computer jocks, who are
poised to flee to the boonies, where they can store
and grow food without having to fend off rapacious
neighbors.
Dallas systems analyst Steve Watson told Wired
magazine that he bought 500 remote Oklahoma
acres and several guns after recognizing the full
ramifications of the Y2K crisis.
Mr. Watson did not respond to interview requests
from The Dallas Morning News. A vice president
of the firm he works for, DMR Consulting, said Mr.
Watson had come to regret his public stance, which
"the company doesn't share."
But in one respect, every cautionary voice is right.
Y2K is absolutely guaranteed to happen. In a
mounting wave that will crest powerfully on Jan. 1,
2000, computers will encounter dates in which the
two-digit year field reads 00, which "noncompliant"
computers will read as 1900.
Depending on whether a particular computer needs
to know what year it is - to calculate accrued
interest, for example, or to track maintenance
schedules of industrial machinery - it may go on
working normally, produce bad data or simply
freeze up. If enough computers fail - say, at banks
or telephone companies - the whole country,
perhaps the world, could wake up with a whale of a
New Year's hangover.
By some estimates, industries and governments will
spend as much as $600 billion to make things right.
Even so, the Gartner Group, a research firm that has
studied the issue since 1989, forecasts that half of
the companies around the world will experience
some disruption of their operations, further sapping
an already woozy global economy.
Precisely who will get hurt, how badly and for how
long is the question - a question impossible to
answer.
"The uncertainty factor is immense. That's what
makes this prophetic material," said Dr. Richard
Landes, director of the Center for Millennial Studies
at Boston University.
"Back when I first heard about Y2K, I immediately
realized that this would be grist for the apocalyptic
prophets' mills."
At a vigorous 32, Mr. Elder hardly fits the hoary
image of a prophet.
A marketing major from the University of Arkansas,
he ran his own hydraulic service company until a
couple of years ago, when he began devoting himself
to studies of biblical prophecies and other spiritual
texts.
"The angel of death, that's how I feel," he said.
He wants urgently for others to heed his warning, to
believe, as he does, that anyone who remains above
ground faces certain annihilation. Once the power
grid goes dark, as he is sure it will, the financial
system will collapse, he said.
"Then we're back to the barter system and 'How
much food do you have?' "
That's only a prelude however. On May 5, 2000,
Mr. Elder said, most of the planets in the solar
system will align themselves on the opposite side of
the sun from Earth. That will trigger the solar gales
and the asteroid shower, which will precipitate still
further catastrophes.
"The computer problem will weed out a lot, and the
solar wind will get the rest," he said. "The time to
prepare is right now."
For prepare, read: find a cave. Mr. Elder has his
sights on one near Cassville, Mo., that he figures can
accommodate 125 people.
If he can reach a deal with the present owners, he
plans to add plumbing, ventilation, diesel-fired
generators, grow lights and enough basic supplies to
sustain life for as long as seven years. Everyone will
share the costs - $11,743 per person, he calculates.
Byron Kirkwood isn't ready to live in a cave, but he
does plan to be prepared for Y2K. Which in his
case is easy, since he runs a mail-order survival
products business from his rural Oklahoma home.
He started the company six years ago, after his wife,
Annie, said she received messages from the Virgin
Mary - which she passed on in a series of books -
warning that cataclysmic "earth changes" were
imminent.
These days, though, most of Mr. Kirkwood's
customers are more worried about whether Y2K
will cripple the U.S. economy than whether the
Earth is about to turn on its side and acquire a
second sun.
Mrs. Kirkwood said Mary has not explicitly
addressed Y2K, although she did warn recently that
"major changes . . . will come about through
government, banking institutions and
telecommunications. Your power sources will be
interrupted, and your life will change drastically."
"That sure fits Y2K," Mr. Kirkwood said, "but she
didn't come right out and say, 'The computers will
fail.' "
In any case, he said, sales of his survival products
are up five-fold over last year, with water filters,
hand-cranked radios and long-shelf-life foods
leading the list.
A rack in his office displays freeze-dried entrees -
pepper steak, cheese ravioli and chili - packaged
with individual chemical heating units. Some orders
have come from as far away as Hong Kong and
Austria.
Like many Y2K pessimists, he gets much of his
information and does much of his business via the
Internet - using computers to bewail humankind's
impending betrayal by computers.
"I'm not trying to be a doomsayer," Mr. Kirkwood
said. "I only give TEOTWAWKI a 10 percent
chance of happening."
However, he said, if food becomes scarce, "there's
not enough police, not enough national guard, not
enough military to go around."
Those who stockpile food, water and cash - or who
head for the hills - may look foolish to those who
don't, he said, but only time will tell who are the real
fools.
"Some of us will look stupid one way, or some of us
will look stupid the other way," he said. "You just
don't know which side of stupid you're going to be
on."
Although Y2K is a purely technological, secular
problem, there is a strong nexus between Y2K
anxieties and religious millennialism, which predicts a
catastrophic cleansing as the precursor to a new
paradise.
Like the Kirkwoods and Mr. Elder, the Dallas Area
Y2K Community Preparedness Group is overtly
Christian. The Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian
Broadcasting Network has extensive Y2K links on
its Web site.
And Dr. Gary North, whom some regard as the
Paul Revere of the Y2K crisis, is prominent in the
Religious Reconstruction movement, which
advocates replacing the Constitution with biblical
law. Dr. North used to live in Tyler, Texas, but he
has moved to northern Arkansas, which, like eastern
Oklahoma, offers solitude to separatists of various
persuasions.
"The millennial myth can take secular or religious
forms," said Dr. Philip Lamy, a sociologist at
Castleton State College in Vermont who studies
millennial movements.
Regardless of the form, he said, the driving force is
angst about today's rapid social change - change as
momentous as that experienced during the Industrial
Revolution.
"What a lot of millennial groups are trying to do is
hold onto the past," Dr. Lamy said. "They are
merely saying that they're afraid."
Of course, fear is not an unreasonable response.
"This is not a false issue," said Bill Wachel, a
computer consultant who founded DFW Prep 2000,
a forum in which industry representatives share
information on the issue.
"It's possible, yeah, that the whole world could
come apart. Is it probable? No."
Dr. Leon Kappelman of the University of North
Texas is leading the charge for government to
pressure crucial industries such as electric utilities,
telecommunications and medicine to fix Y2K
problems. He isn't anticipating doom, but he doubts
that many Americans will escape unscathed.
"I don't really know what the future is. I know there
are serious risks," he said. "I expect life to be a little
more difficult for awhile."
He has no use for those who choose to flee.
"Cowards would be a good word [for them]," he
said. "Deserters."
Dr. Landes, too, urges Americans to hang together
rather than hang separately.
"Y2K can be a gift," he said. "It's a test. How do we
as a culture handle this - not only the problem, but
the rhetoric surrounding the problem?"
As Mr. Elder explored the cave he had chosen to
demonstrate to a visitor the wisdom of his plan, he
came upon artifacts of a earlier era's doomsday
fears. Next to a sign designating the cavern as an
official fallout shelter lay tins of 1950s-vintage
survival rations.
The tins were unopened and pocked with rust.
� 1998 The Dallas Morning News
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