By the Year 2000...

"By the year 2000 we're gonna have smell-a-vision on all the TVs." The words of the cashier astonished me so that I could not verbalize a response, but my brain thought:
"Does this woman really believe that everyone will have smell-a-vision installed in their homes within the next four months?" Then it occurred to me that she was simply a product of conditioning- just like me. For all of our lives we had heard that the year 2000 was some magical benchmark by which time all things mysterious, wonderful, or hideous would have come to pass. In fact, some of the most memorable moments of my early education revolved around the mythical date.

My first recollection of such talk was in 1977. As a wide-eyed second grader, I listened attentively as Mrs. Tubberville explained how if this global warming trend continued much of what we know as the present-day United States would soon be under water due to the melting of the polar ice caps. I remember her showing us a map outlining the catastrophe. She pointed out that New Orleans would be the first to go. She went on to say that the coastal regions of Florida would become submerged shortly after. There was even a good chance that Gulf Shores would go under. In fact, all of the decent beaches along the Gulf of Mexico would be under water by the year 2000. I tried to imagine summer vacation without the beach. When I pointed out to the others, with a glimmer of hope in my eye, that we would still have beaches, only further inland, the teacher countered with: “Yes, but they won’t be white and sandy, just muddy and yucky.” Bewildered, I accepted her decree along with the rest of my classmates and began to look upon the new millennium with a certain dread.

In third grade a more frightening prospect was brought to mind: killer bees. Flooding seemed so predictable and escapable, but killer bees conjured up images of swift and random demise. It seems there had been some escape of wild "African" killer bees somewhere in South America or Mexico. Again, the teacher used the map to blaze the image into our little minds. It was the domino theory in effect, only the threat seemed even more real and frightening than the communists. Never satiated, the bees would simply continue northward, inhabiting any place with a suitable climate, stinging and terrorizing the inhabitants with a venom "100 times more powerful" than that of the bees we had in Alabama. One child was assured that our climate was just hot enough to sustain the dreadful beasts, though they might not make it into Tennessee. In fact, it seemed that a contingent of the monsters had already reached the remote areas of Texas but were destroyed in time. The fact that the abominable creatures had reached U.S. soil made the threat seem all too real to me. Last I heard the bees were still stranded in Texas but definitely headed this way.

The fourth grade brought with it the threat of the metric system. "Everyone in the world is on it except the U.S. If we don't change, pretty soon the rest of the world won't do business with us any more." The logic was hazy, like that of the domino theory, but who could question something that was so ominous and apparent to our teacher? I spent the summer of 1980 repeating the words "deca-, deci-, centi-, milli-" like some kind of mantra. This endeavor paid off for me since I use the metric system frequently as a scientist, but I do seem to recall a bit of chaos when the state of Alabama actually tried for a year or two to slowly wean its citizens from the English system. In addition to mile markers, kilometer markers were placed along the state highways. Soon ambulances and police vehicles were getting lost and people were unable to find their way to places that they used to know perfectly well. Stranded travelers, equipped with technology well beyond their understanding, used their cell phones to give errant information about their whereabouts to their loved ones and towing companies. In fact, the residents were so confounded by the signs that the state had to take them back down at a cost of untold millions to the taxpayers. I guess they didn't convince enough other kids of the importance of the metric system.

To me, the most incomprehensible of the apocalyptic events that would take place by the year 2000 was that of the unstoppable advance of kudzu. Anyone growing up in the deep South will know what I mean. According to our weekly dose of propaganda, the crawling green weed would consume much of what we had, choking out any other plants that dared compete with it, overrunning entire neighborhoods, growing at such a tremendous rate that no mortal could possibly resist it. I never really understood how a plant could be so irrepressible, but blindly accepted it along with the other facts. By this time possibly a substantial portion of the population would have been snuffed out by bees or flooding or perhaps so frustrated by the metric system that they no longer had the willpower or mental capacity to oppose the plant. Whatever the reason, I was sure that by the year 2000 it would cover every square foot of the South, making life as we knew it impossible.*
 
I don't know what you're planning to do to ring in the new year, but I'll be at home downing Pop Rocks and drinking copious amounts of Coke. Might as well live life on the edge, because sure as Dick Clark all hell’s breaking lose on New Year's eve. In the meantime, I'll be laying low, trying to avoid those door-to-door Smell-a-Vision salesmen.
 
*I must admit that I have used the knowledge of this impending doom to my advantage. In the past two months I have made a small fortune selling Y2K survival kits that include (along with the standard fare of dried milk, canned goods, and toilet paper) a small inflatable boat, a mason jar of white sand from the Gulf coast, killer bee antivenin, an English-to-metric conversion chart, and a machete. I really believe the citizens of the next millennium will be much better suited to cope with the challenges of that time than we could even imagine today.