First post....

So many subjects, so much to say about each, so little time.

Let's discuss millennial optimism and post-2000 disillusion. Years ago, I read a history of the middle ages, in which there was a colorful description of the years 990-1000. Something about the impending round number had caused people throughout "Christendom", i.e. western europe, to believe that the world was coming to an end. Preachers preached doom and urged repentance, crowds gathered to wait for the demise of the world. This was, in effect, the end of the dark ages; at least in the view of that particular writer, a culmination of centuries of ruin and despair.

The very fact that the world did not come to an end, apparently, gave rise to a burst of optimism and the beginning of the more prosperous middle ages, which eventually in turn would give way to the renaissance and then finally modern times.

I read this passage with great foreboding; it was the late 1990's, the end of the next millenium was fast approaching, and western civilization was engaged in an orgy of optimism, which struck me as the opposing mirror image to the final decade of the preceding millennium. There were books with silly titles like "The End of History." The stock market was breaking effortlessly through to new records, 10,000 was followed by 11, then 12, 13 and 14,000. Internet stocks and frenzied day-trading seemed to fit the pattern, as did all the worldwide planning for end of the millenium parties.

There were occasional darker notes, such as the now largely forgotten hysteria over the Y2K problem -- the fear that computers were programmed to keep time in centuries, but would massively fail when forced to adjust to a change of the first integer, representing the millennial level.

But still, the celebratory atmosphere seemed to me a culmination of centuries which had been characterized by economic growth, the spread of democracy and the broad extension of rights -- things we take for granted like the elimination of slavery and women's suffrage. And if the despair of the 990's had given way to a new more optimistic way of thinking, would the complacency, enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations of the 1990's, be a precursor to darker times?

Of course, I knew it was sheer intellectual hubris to think in such vast over-arching terms. An unpublished armchair philosopher daring to contemplate the sweep of history. And I did not write or speak about it, except to a handful of people who are accustomed to my habit of developing pet theories about subjects on which I have no right to opine.

A handful of years later, there I was on September 11, 2001, watching plumes of smoke from a wedge-shaped dent in the side of first one and then two towers. I was in the neighborhood known as the West Village, on Seventh Avenue, far enough away to be safe, but close enough to see clearly what was happening, and to feel with certainty that at least one building would fall.

Now, a terrible confession. I didn't really dwell on the people in the building, the horrible suffering and miserable deaths they faced. The other pedestrians on the sidewalk where screaming, crying, shaken. I was frightened and sad, but also, I was a little excited, like a scientist, observing experimental proof of a working hypothesis. There was history, I thought. Now begins a new period.

to be continued, thanks to any and all readers for your kind attention....