Y2K+25 years
“We had laughter we had fun, we had seasons in the sun,” Terry Jacks.
Hey, we made it. I know there were some rough spots in there where it seemed touch and go at times. There were some scary moments, some tears shed and hopefully a good bit of laughter. As always we lost some friends and loved ones along the way. We have made it to the end of another year and look out on the beginning of another.
A quarter century ago, many of us celebrated the start of a new millennium (even if the pedantic crowd corrected us about how years are numbered starting with 1 and so years ending in 0 are more correctly the end of the previous series of years.) The biggest fear at the time was over concerns that computers wouldn’t be able to handle the calendar change. Doomsayers painted images of planes falling from the sky, the banking system being shut down, and power grids failing with mass blackouts. In Gilman, the late village president Gerald DeStaercke was at village hall on New Years Eve just in case the lights went out and they needed to use the PTO shaft on a borrowed tractor to run the pumps and keep the water flowing. For weeks prior, the county’s emergency government office and emergency preparedness folks at the state level were giving increasing dire instructions for how much water and fuel to stockpile in the case of wholesale societal breakdown. This was immediately followed up by fire departments warning of the risk of home fires and carbon monoxide poisoning due to improper use of kerosene heaters.
Despite the buzzkill of the doom and gloom crowd, for those, especially of my generation who were in our mid to late 20s at the time, faced the dawning of the new century with hope.
I remember my friends gathering at our home and raising our glasses watching the television broadcasts of the new year being rung around the world time zone by time zone. We celebrated new beginnings and the potential for great things to happen as the dawn of the first day of the new year chased away the darkness of the past. In my personal life, my wife and I were awaiting the birth of our first child and the future was bright and scary ahead of us.
In some ways, the start or end of any year is an arbitrary day. It is a pin that someone sticks in a wall calendar and says “Here begins a new year.” The state of Wisconsin marks the start of its fiscal year on July 1. The federal government starts its year on October 1. Parents of students in school think of the new year beginning in September when classes begin. Others measure years in their personal calendars from the birth of a child, the death of a loved one or the anniversary of some life event.
When you are 27, 25 years seems like an eternity. At 52, 25 years seems like only a short while ago. I can’t speak through personal experience, but I would suspect the sense of the passage of time continues to speed up. I’ll let you know in 25 years if my theory holds out to be accurate.
There is no doubt that the new year will bring with it challenges and opportunities. There are laundry lists of fears, concerns and worries. Headlines and click-bait stories wallow in the awfulness that human beings inflict on one another.
The darkness is real and there are very good reasons to be afraid of it. Yet, as long as life remains and the world turns, there will be a new sunrise and an end to the darkness.
When I was a kid, my family would go out on our front porch at midnight and bang on pots and pans to celebrate the new year. We could often hear our neighbors doing the same thing. An anthropologist or social scientist may theorize on the roots of the ritual about beliefs that the noise chases away the darkness of the past and makes space for the good things that will come in the new year. They wouldn’t be wrong.
It is time for us to brush off the dust of the past year and throw open the windows onto a new one and make a joyful noise to welcome the new one, whatever it may bring.
Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News. Contact Brian at BrianWilson@centralwinews.com.
