Pre-millenial tension

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Brad Wallace

Let's stop and take a look around: The American economy has joined the global depression, genocide and war are sweeping across the world, our government is falling into a nasty display of partisan stupidity, and Alanis Morissette is releasing a new album. If you add the current plague of trials to an upcoming millennial year which will bring religious wackos and a very probable crisis in the computer systems that run the world, it's all starting to look pretty sketchy.

Here's what I think is going to happen: A sharp economic downturn here will force major media networks to have more commercials, which will cause most Americans to stop watching television, which will lead to widespread despair coinciding with Bob Saget declaring himself the prophet of the new millennium.

Simultaneously, the rest of the world will actually be busy with societal unrest and monetary policy. Angered with America's indifference, other countries will make metal things fall out of the sky and explode, and many people will find that they have stopped being alive. As the sun rises on that new millennium, the world will be a burning husk, with Bob Saget's fanatical eyes gazing out over the sea of chaos.

We don't need to worry about obtaining a well-paid job with our newly-minted degrees, we need to worry about stockpiling seeds and making swords to protect our loved ones.

I recommend that everyone immediately withdraw from the university and begin an intensive wilderness survival training program.

Save your notebooks though, you'll need the paper to start fires when the utility infrastructure collapses due to a computer thinking that it's 1900, all because some programmer in the 1960's couldn't imagine that time would actually keep passing.

Of course, this is all a bit ridiculous, and most likely, civilization will not collapse. Nonetheless, it seems apparent that the Pax Americana, America's hegemonic eminence in the world is coming to a close. As they've been saying on CNN, these are truly historic days, and the world is being reborn in a new form.

Which places us in a most critical role: We are the generation that will be coming of age in the new millennium.

What are we going to do? Will we fulfill the "Generation X" media garbage that's been shoved down our throats for the last decade and be remembered as a generation that accomplished very little besides making some pretty good independent films? Or will it be us that starts a new day in history, bringing the 20th century's legacy of racism and social inequality to an end?

My biggest fear is that we'll jump at the status quo - I know that's what I really want. Despite my rhetoric about making a better world, what I really crave is access to clean supermarkets and a comprehensive cable package for $19.99.

If it comes down to voting for elected officers who will begin widespread reforms and radical change or those who pursue more moderate policies, I'm afraid that I'd choose the latter. Selfish, yes, but I'd also argue typical.

The last 50 years or so brought the bomb, Cold War, the collapse of the superpowers, radical student movements, the crushing greed of the 1980 and the Star Wars trilogy. The next 50 years, which will bear our fingerprints, promise to make these events as antiquated and naive as the Teapot Dome Scandal.

The future is going to surprise the hell out of us all.

The world may not literally end Jan. 1, 2000. Nonetheless, the world that we're all very comfortable in right now has started to die.

We are the lucky ones who get to slap the new world on the butt and pick out the baby clothes. Let's hope we do it right.

Brad Wallace is a molecular and cellular biology senior. His column, Handful of Dust, appears every Tuesday and he can be reached via e-mail at Brad.Wallace@wildcat.arizona.edu.