The Y2K Problem Challenges All of Us

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The United States is ahead of almost every other country in the world in dealing with the Y2K problem, in part through the efforts of my good friend John Koskinen and the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, which Koskinen chairs. But even the federal government and private corporations, which are in the vanguard, are doing triage by focusing only on their own "mission critical" problems. As the report cards handed out by Congressman Horn's subcommittee have made clear, there is a great disparity in how well different government agencies are doing. The Social Security Administration, for example, started fixing its code in 1991 and has a good chance of being Y2K compliant by the millennium. But Medicare has virtually no chance of being ready. The elderly who rely on Medicare will face the year 2000 not knowing when they will receive their next check. Similar delays can be expected in income-support payments.

Like the federal government, large corporations have already spent billions of dollars and years of person-hours of effort in order to fix their systems. But even those corporations that are furthest along in the process must worry about their suppliers, customers, and local infrastructure systems.

Surveys teach us that failures within the United States are most likely with small and medium businesses and at the county and municipal levels of government. On the international level, many developing countries, most Middle Eastern countries, and Russia, China, India, Thailand, Argentina, and Venezuela are far behind.

There is an enormous amount of uncertainty about the nature of the failures to come, the seriousness of dislocations, and how long it will take to correct them. However, the probability of substantial failures is sufficiently great that careful attention must be given to how we prepare for the date. So, while we must accelerate our efforts to remediate what we can in the time remaining, we must also focus on ways to respond to a world that on January 1, 2000, may look different and more threatening than the world to which we have become accustomed.

The first thing we must do, both individually and societally, is to resist the powerful urge to engage in "us versus them" thinking and to worry exclusively about ourselves and our immediate families. People who are learning how to use automatic weapons and going out into the desert to wait out the Y2K crisis are not only acting immorally, in my view, but are living a fantasy. There aren't enough weapons or a desert big enough if we all decide to look out only for ourselves. Isolationism is just as dangerous on the international level because we depend on many foreign companies and countries for critical products and resources.

Some wonderful examples of communities coming together to meet Y2K challenges have begun to emerge throughout the country. For inspiration, go to the Cassandra Project web site (www.cassandraproject.org) or to the web sites of specific communities such as Lowell, Massachusetts; Northern Virginia; Tucson, Arizona; and Santa Cruz, California; and the many equally helpful sites that are springing up on an almost daily basis. But we must also begin to take a look at how our larger society, not just the local neighborhood or community, can respond to the Y2K crisis.

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