With the author's permission, I have hypertexted and posted Arnie Rimmer's excellent essay, Y2k and Erosion of the Middle Ground in the euy2k.com "guest columns" archive. I urge everyone to read the piece, and to consider the implications.

Critt Jarvis is looking for a few good "middle grounders". ;-)

-- Anonymous, March 27, 1999

Answers

Excellent article. I totally agree that those of us that take a middle ground position on this find themselves assaulted from every direction lately. The Gov't ,media and the Big Corps. all seem to want us to tow the "party line" now. The No problem it's all fixed or will be soon position. Don't prepare for more then a few days etc.. It seems that the powers to be have decided the "real" Y2k problem is the human factor in all this, not the possibility of machine failure. That really bothers me. I find their pronoucements to be extremely condenscending. if anything it's had the opposite effect on me. It's made me step up my preparations plans.

-- Anonymous, March 27, 1999

In corporate America, even within Y2K project teams, we are beginning to see significant pressure being brought against Middle Grounders by the No Big Deal factions, especially NBD-ers in mid-level and upper level management positions.

I listened to one of these people expound upon the dangers from the Y2K extremists, i.e., anyone who advocates anything more than 3-day preparations. This person had seen a news report on a recent Y2K Expo held in our area, which was the immediete cause for his opinion making. These expos are attended mostly by concerned Middle Grounders, or by the curious; but here and there by a sprinkling of far right-wing extremists.

I mentioned to this person that out of curiosity, I had attended the same Y2K Expo, and for the most part, the majority of attendees seemed to be mothers in their late twenties or early thirties, towing their young children behind them. He was not impressed.

Another recent incident is instructive: One of our contingency planning experts admitted during a Y2K planning session that he had purchased a home generator. He caught hell for that later from some of the leading No Big Deal-ers.

This kind of thing is obviously going to get more and more intense as Year 2000 draws near.

-- Anonymous, March 27, 1999

I'll post an update on connecting Middle Grounders tonight after 9pm North Carolina time (March 29th).

~C~

-- Anonymous, March 29, 1999

"Yes, Virginia. There is a Middle Ground."

Here's the current schedule as of 30 March 1999:

March 31 - Raleigh/Durham
April 1 - Wilmington/Southport/Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

April 6,7- Hendersonville/Asheville
April 8 - Charlotte

Bandler - "[],that which is already available to an individual is nowhere near what that person is capable of."

~C~

-- Anonymous, March 30, 1999

I've been a middle-grounder for quite a while, because of two core assumptions that are based on history.

1. The history of IT tells me that large, complex IT projects ALWAYS have problems -- schedule slippage, cost overruns, bugs, and less functionality than planned are all rife. Therefore Y2K WILL be a good deal worse than most politicos and corporate execs now believe.

2. The many tragic wars of this bloody century do provide a very convincing demonstration that even prolonged and massive air raids, putting orders of magnitude more stress on a society than any Y2K scenario I consider plausible for the US, cannot destroy a society. Therefore, I am convinced that whatever happens it will not be TEOTWAKI or anything like it.

My best guess, for what it's worth, is something akin to a combination of a moderate earthquake in CA, a hurricane somewhere else, and an oil embargo like OPEC in the 1970s, all generating a recession that may be somewhat worse than the one OPEC triggered. But this guess could be wrong in either direction...

-- Anonymous, March 31, 1999

I am admittedly fussy about words, so I would like to point out that the acronym, TEOTWAWKI, has gotten a bad rap. In general usage it has come to mean "The End of The World", which as far as I am aware was not the original intent. (I do remember when I first encountered it many months ago and the context was not one of doom.)

Mathew's middle ground scenario of recession and possibly combined consequences such as would be encountered by natural disasters would certainly qualify for TEOTWAWKI in it's original usage. A severe recession in this country after booming prosperity, combined with various other potential failures, would definitely be the end of the world As We Know It. The focus has shifted to the first part of the phrase, when the basic meaning in its entirety implys only that "things we are now used to will Change".

In effect, TEOTWAWKI covers all middle ground predictions if the full phrase, including "as we know it" is used. It's become so identified with doom, however, that I don't expect that will change. Readers should be aware, though, that some people who use the acronym are still not actually predicting the end of the world, and it might prevent misunderstandings if it's determined exactly what an individual means when they use it.

-- Anonymous, March 31, 1999

To all middle-grounders: I wish I could be that "optimistic". Matthew Healy makes a good point about the resilience of societies like the British during the London Blitz for instance. Unfortunately, a more apropos analogy would likely be the seige of Leningrad. Difference? SUPPLIES. The Brits had us to send them food and raw materials and weapons and more. Whereas, Leningraders' had only the "ice road". In war, people can endure unending hardship as long as there is a supply line. When it stops, they die and freeze to death by the tens of thousands as they did in Leningrad. But Leningraders had one thing that I fear might be lacking with a bad Y2K scenario - realistic hope for a quick recovery. All they had to do was drive the Germans back - a "simple" solution in terms of intuition if not execution. Verification of the "state of siege" is there for all to verify immediately. But with Y2K, I really fear all our overblown optimism could just as easily be displaced by overwhelming pessimism once the true scope of the full problem unfolds in early 2000. Most people can't "grasp" the complexity and scope of Y2K - whereas war is relatively easy to grasp. This could lead to the "swimming in a fog" problem - when one can't see land, they're more prone to give up sooner. Who will be sending us supplies for a change? Where will even our "ice road" be? One of the pervasive aspects of the Great Depression - was that it was DEPRESSING! People suffered emotionally - very deeply and quite profoundly. Hard times seemed to grind on forever with no let-up. Hope was in short supply. That's what concerns me even more than food shortages and power outages. Y2K threatens to rob our "happiness" - something we Americans value more than any other country. And that in turn threatens to rob our "freedom" to pursue happiness. Our government is already gotten a little "too authoritarian" for most people's tastes in this country. Couple that with the understanding that authoritarian systems recover from disasters much more quickly than free market systems - and one can begin to appreciate the REAL threat Y2K presents. Middle grounders, I hope I can join you, but only if someone can convince me that the power will stay ON. If not, I see no alternative but to assume and plan for the worst.

-- Anonymous, April 07, 1999