rtment store rejects your credit card because your payment is 100 years overdue, your bank’s automated teller swallows your card, thinking it has expired and your Social Security payments are cut off because the agency’s computers miscalculate your age. “While elsewhere, bank vaults refuse to open, building security systems fail, refusing to read coded cards or keys, and airline flight schedules are thrown into disarray because of flaws in the air traffic control system computers (The Year 2000).” How can you prepare? Try to make all possible preparations as soon as you can. It would be a good idea to keep extra cash hand, perhaps enough to live on for an entire week. “Plan to spend a fair amount of time checking, upgrading and preparing your home computer and software applications (Zuckerman 1).” Have plenty of battery-operated lights, long burning candles or kerosene lamps. Kerosene heaters and wood stoves are alternative means for heating your home. The earth continues to circle the sun and the calendar relentlessly progresses toward the year 2000. If we cannot immediately change from rhetoric to action, from politics to participation or turn to one another and work together for a common good, we will stand fearfully in that new dawn and suffer consequences that might well have been avoided if we had learned to stand together now....
