WE ARE BEING CO-OPTED!

A puzzling thing has been happening to those concerned about y2k, starting at the beginning of this year. A kind of psychic glue is being poured on peoples consciousness, and is leaving us bewildered at the loss of the clarity of our vision.

This glue has come in three waves.

First, there was a barrage of news reports about y2k starting New Years Day, raising the problem and seemingly laying it to rest in the same article. This is called balanced reporting because since nobody knows what is really going to happen any opinion is equally valid. In addition, I have seen article after article with a text that gives a lot of bad news and a sunny, positive headline. It seems to be socially responsible to wake people up and equally socially responsible to put them back to sleep again. The big fear that reporters and politicians have is that people will actually draw conclusions from y2k reports and act on them.

Secondly, here in Santa Rosa, we have had a couple of events to focus interest on y2k, namely the Earth Elders Info meeting for seniors January 30th and the city/county citizens informational meeting February 18th. At both of these, government officials and business representatives said everything is OK! Never mind that the week after the February meeting we all received bulletins in our gas and electric bills saying that Pacific G&E really could NOT guarantee that the power would work, or their suppliers would be y2k compliant, etc.

The third event was Senators Bennett and Dodds press conference in which they stated that people do not need to prepare beyond 3 days or so. Even the reporter who asked the question about how long to prepare was flabbergasted by this answer, and anyone who has read the text of the Senate report knows that some serious things are going to go wrong. I have had good folks ask me if I thought someone was in the back room holding a gun to the senators wives heads to make them give out such misleading and untruthful sound bites in the face of the actual Senate report!

All this has left many of us asking ourselves if we are really nuts, maybe it isnt so bad, lets get back into the dailyness and go shopping.....

It takes a lot of energy to get out of the dailyness of our lives enough to see y2k. Fear can be a useful short-term emotion to fuel the realization that y2k really IS going to affect us. But, after the fear stage, we must move on to sober preparation and informing others.

Everyone is so afraid of causing fear, that by watering down the message to be non-threatening they are diluting the realizations that will cause us to act. Fear about an event months in the future can be dealt with, fear on January 1st will be called panic.

There ARE other ways to get past the daily soporific of media massage that our culture feeds us, and that is why people who are ardent about causes and alternatives to the main culture as diverse as eco-freaks, Christians, Patriots, home-schoolers, off-the grid homesteaders, community activists, counterculturists and hard-money populists get what y2k is about more easily. Those of us who turn off the TV and go for a walk in the woods, deliver a baby lamb, go rock-climbing, or seriously practice a religion have tastes of Reality.

There are powerful forces out there that do not want us to wake up, and want to put us back to sleep if by any chance we do get a clue. Im no conspiracy theorist but I do see a wide array of dont rock the boaters who range in atttitude from benevolent to neutral to malevolent.

These forces include, in no particular order, inertia of daily life, vested financial and political interests, folks who dont want to get fired for sending bad news about IT repairs upstairs, business executives who know their computers cant be fixed in time but dont want their stock to crash, people who know about y2k but want to get their stuff first, others who know but dont want to appear crazy, bureaucrats who dont want to alarm the public, politicians who dont want runs on the banks, etc. etc. Besides, this is all just so comfortable the way it is now, I dont want to be bothered........

All this denial and lying and avoidance is that psychic glue. Dont look to the media to unstick us - the glue manufacturers are their sponsors and paying advertisers. They want us asleep for their own purposes.

The desire to get the media on our side to get the message out is resulting in some y2k associations and activists getting co-opted back into what is acceptable to the general culture. Its not going to work to tell people to prepare for 3-7 days so that we can be acceptable. I can imagine a lot of people being pretty darn angry when bad things happen if the y2k leaders, who KNOW there is a problem, have not told them the best possible recommendations to protect themselves, their kids, and their communities.

Donna Jones

-- Donna Jones (seraphima@aol.com), March 11, 1999

Answers

Donna,

I agree with everything you said, with the exception of, "Its not going to work to tell people to prepare for 3-7 days so that we can be 'acceptable'."

And it's not that I don't agree with that, except that for the past 18 months it has been impossible to get average people - the people with those kids, parents, grandparents - to even consider the notion that y2k is going to cause problems. I'm sure I don't need to elaborate on the "Profound Mystery," but it's been my extensive face- to-face experience that most people aren't planning on lifting a finger. The suggestion they prepare for two weeks, two months, two years of y2k fallout is as absurd and foreign to them as the idea of having a will drawn up right away is to a 16 year old on a Friday night.

Where I live (200 miles south of the Canadian border), 3 to 7 days of no infrastructure means chaos like no one can contemplate, and probably a fair number of dead average people (and their kids). The temperatures here are much more likely to be below zero in January than they are above freezing. Blizzards with 35 mph winds that drive snow into impassable drifts are not uncommon at that time of year.

If y2k is going to be as serious as those genuinely concerned anticipate, the idea of everyone being prepared to live on their own for 3 to 7 days here (and many other places) has little to do with the "appearance of acceptibility," and everything to do with A) making the idea acceptable to the average person, and B) providing a worst case "survival buffer," no matter how slim or inadequate.

I agree (completely) that in circumstances that would make that kind of thing necessary, 3 to 7 days is ridiculous. But to give you an idea of what we're up against locally when it comes to people getting the message that might motivate them to even pick up an extra candle or two, you're invited and encouraged to read and comment on the y2k article that appeared in last Sunday's paper (everyone's invited to do the same). I've posted it a forum just like this one in hopes of gathering some insights from others that may counteract some of the damage that has no doubt been done.

The article is here. The ("email clean") url is:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000b2L

"Letters to the editor" appreciated. (By me, anyway.)

-- Bill (billdale@lakesnet.net), March 13, 1999.