The Y2K Neighborhood

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'We looked at the year 2000 problem as a technical problem we didn't want to be too public about,' she says. 'We knew about it, and we were very serious about dealing with our own information systems, but really had no concept of all the embedded systems that are out there. This is something I've only learned about in the last week,' she told me. It was September 8, 1998.

Coopee had been suspicious of the religious tone of some Y2K information. She attributed advice to create emergency provisions of food and water to 'those nuts out in Montana and Idaho, those survivalists.' After dismissing Y2K to friends and relatives as no big deal, she succumbed to a friend's pressure to review a set of reports. 'There was great resistance inside me to even look at this stuff,' she says. After she did, however, she realized that, 'I was the one who had been blind and not really seeing the whole problem I'm starting to feel the emotional effects of it. It's actually kind of hard to talk about it without crying at this point.'

When I asked her what concerned her, she said she was shocked to learn
the pervasiveness of embedded computer systems that perform cycle calculations based on a calendar date. 'It's amazing the, uh, impact
on our' She apologized as she softly wept.

After a moment I asked her what she saw that might escape someone without her technical background.

'I'm seeing the very real possibility of the end of the lifestyle as we know itour lives--I'll just go ahead and cry--our lives, I feel, are never going to be the same. They may be vastly better if we do pull this off in terms of coming together as a community, and really facing this, and coming up with alternativesto being so blindly dependent on technology. I mean it could be really a wonderful change, but it is going to be different. I was sitting on a dock yesterday, on Lake Washington, and I looked up and I saw
there's the blue sky, and below there's this beautiful waterand well, that won't be changed. But it's almost like everything else in our lives is going to change. Even if it's changed for the better--you know?--it's going to take a lot of work to get there. And when we're there it may take a lot more workhaving to live in a society where we have to relate to each other and be dependent on each other and communicate on a daily basis for our survival is not something that--as wonderful as it sounds--it's not something that most of us have any experience or preparation to do

'My mother and I were talking about this. She's 79. She said, 'It's taking us back to the horse-and-buggy days.' And I said, 'Yeah, minus the horses and the buggies.''

That's what TEOTWAWKI actually sounds like. Is media satire of such painful soul-searching a sign of callousness? Not necessarily. In a recent essay, Margaret Wheatley and her colleague Myron Kellner-Rogers wrote of Y2K: 'It reveals our very human tendency to deny and hide from issues when they are too complex to comprehend.' The media, notes Dr. Kent Hoffman, a Spokane psychotherapist who is helping to launch a community-preparedness initiative called 'Y2K Neighborhood,' is no more immune to Y2K's inescapable psychological challenge than anyone else.

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