Future Fatigue
POGREBIN, LETTY COTTIN
Letty Cottin Pogrebin Future Fatigue Millennial madness may have a deeper effect than we realize. • In 1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman predicted the world would one day see "professional women with...
...As is well known by now, Jews figure prominently in some of the disaster scenarios...
...And fear can make a person more suspicious of the "other," more selfish and self-protective...
...With no Second Coming and no Armageddon, millennial Christians could blame the Jews for postponing the kingdom of God on Earth...
...Perhaps the Y2K fallout will be invisible, like radioactivity—whose long-term impact takes years to become manifest...
...Their predictions ranged from Israeli annexation of the West Bank to the resumption of the Intifada, to all-out warfare...
...New York state's emergency management office has been simulating calamities from computer meltdowns to terrorist attacks on the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Kensico reservoir...
...more receptive to absolutist ideologies...
...In May 1998, at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, experts predicted what would happen on May 4, 1999, if Yasser Arafat declared a Palestinian state...
...What worries me now is the effect of so many apocalyptic forecasts on the human psyche...
...According to the New York Times, governments and corporations say they're prepared for almost anything...
...And, says Landes, "that could get nasty...
...In 1900John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., predicted that by the year 2000 the letters c, x, and q, would be eliminated from the alphabet...
...Letty Cottin Pogrebin's latest book is Getting Over Getting Older: An Intimate Journey (Berkley Publishing Croup...
...It's not nearly as much fun reading predictions about a future that still lies ahead...
...Though Y2K is behind us, at some deeper level, hasn't each of us been shaken up by the countdown to global disaster and the visions of a world gone mad...
...Most current prognoses are bad news narratives—the notion of a progressively improving human society fatally compromised by post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima realities...
...It stands to reason that a barrage of chaos prophecies and scary descriptions of social breakdown could leave many people feeling more vulnerable than they were a year ago...
...I'm not predicting, just wondering...
...In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev predicted Russia would surpass the United States in industrial production by 1970...
...Companies such as Monsanto, DuPont, International Paper, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever hired specialists to imagine what could go wrong and predict "public reactions to political surprises, industrial accidents, or social disruptions that never show up in today's spreadsheets and five-year business plans...
...In 1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman predicted the world would one day see "professional women with families...
...There may be more lunacy ahead...
...1997...
...Call it leap Y2K...
...Boston University professor Richard Landes has counseled the Jewish community to prepare for serious scape-goating when the world doesn't end this year...
...Might the charged anticipation of extreme external disorder leave a residue of internal disorder that lingers in the collective soul...
...Though the 2000th birthday of Jesus means little to us, like it or not we've been assigned a special role in millennial psychodramas...
...Is it just coincidental that Patrick Buchanan ratcheted up his anti-Jewish innuendo in 1999...
...Armed with the knowledge of what really happened, we can marvel at the prognosticator's naivete or prescience, feel regret that the good things never came to pass and relief that the bad things didn't either...
...And stay tuned...
...less likely to trust established political systems and more willing to tolerate repressive leaders who promise security through order...
...In January 1998, after the first of the Monica Lewinsky revelations, TV commentator Sam Donaldson predicted President Bill Clinton would resign within the week...
...Brigadier General Nissim Alfiya, who runs the Israeli Defense Forces' computer division, says that when February 29, 2000 was entered into the army's computer, the system rejected it, insisting the date didn't exist...
...It's fun to read such divining after the fact...
...Might we see a new wave of religious anti-Semitism as a result of the widespread attention to theories that single out Jews as spoilers of the messianic age...
...Though last year's incessant havoc and disaster warnings about Y2K gave me a bad case of future fatigue, I do pay attention to predictions about global warming, genetically engineered crops, and humanity's increasing immunity to antibiotics...
...The Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair predicted the cities of 1960 would have "abundant sunshine, fresh air, fine green parkways, recreational and civic centers—all the result of thoughtful planning and design...
Vol. 25 • February 2000 • No. 1
