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Carl Mollins
Some of us
were too embarrassed to tell how, on the eve of Y2K, we
filled every available vessel with water, stacked the cupboards with
tinned food, fetched wood for the fireplace, emptied the ATM and
detached the P
So, when the computer-driven delivery systems for water, power, fuel, money and information did not crash upon the dawn of the triple-zero New Year, we privately excused ourselves for panicking. We still blame back-of-the-mind remembrances of all those credible new-millennium disasters foretold in the old century's science fiction. Not to mention the reinforcing warnings that total shutdown on Jan. 1, 2000, was as certain as the reality that the 1900s — when all computers had been programmed, mind you — were fading to black.
Vivid in the memory was the plausible account in 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, of the rebellion by HAL the computer (its name, by the way, the alphabetic letters preceding IBM). If HAL could go all human and bossy, as he fatally did in that 1968 book and film, why couldn't our machines ignore orders from the Command and Control keys? Or because their chips wouldn't know how to cope with time measured by dates with all those zeroes?
In any case — although strictly speaking the 21st century and the third millennium A.D. didn't truly start arithmetically until 2001 — the real-life shocks to the mind, body, spirit and purse in those startup stages of the 2000s are sure to make us look back on them at best as the oh-oh-oh years.
We painfully recall the way investors in the electronic communication industries proved ungrateful for the good computer behaviour during the Y2K transition. Dumping stock in those sectors became a rush before the new millennium was into its initial summer.
And then we saw how bursting the tech-stock bubble proved contagious, dragging down markets and economies in the new decade's early years for the third time in a row, if not as steeply as in the 1981-82 and 1990-91 recessions.
Not only did savers and investors lose lots of money before the markets began recuperating in late 2002, but Canada and much of the world, meanwhile, had to deal with in-our-face realities as scary as the spooky things predicted for our times by clairvoyants of the 1900s.
The event never imagined in the wildest of such scenarios, of course, was the calamity christened "9/11," the code that still bespeaks the shock, the pain and the anger churned up by the airborne acts of suicidal terror against the United States by fundamentalist Muslims on Sept. 11, 2001.
The life-will-never-be-the-same-again anxiety provoked by the assaults on symbols of America's commercial and military superiority received apparent confirmation from the fundamentalist Christians in charge of the United States. It was vengeance by the sword and, in choosing targets, the avenger assumed the right to referee the sort of government and the kind of weaponry other nations are permitted to possess. In its declared War on Terror, Washington indeed appeared intent on making the new century the founding time of an American empire with a global reach.
But perhaps now that's not to be. By 9/11's second anniversary, developments and diversions raised questions about whether much was changing after all.
Argument over the invasion of Iraq now seems merely to turn the situation into a repetition of America's expensive, divisive and fruitless Vietnam War years of 1965-75 rather than something historically unique.
And as the killing in Iraq raged into November, and the U.S. budget deficit soared to troubling heights, events elsewhere have begun to prompt questions about just whose century this is really likely to be. Prominent candidates are the quarter of the earth's population living in thriving China, sponsor of an inaugural manned space flight in mid-October and self-confident enough to shrug off U.S. pressure to revalue its currency in favour of competing traders.
As for Canada, our recent blighting domestic disturbances — Air Canada's filing for bankruptcy protection, the SARS outbreak in Ontario, the mad cow case that cut off cattle exports, British Columbia's fires and floods, hurricane Juan in the Maritimes — drained urgency from the War on Terror. Ontario, along with its American neighbours, also took a hit from a mid-August electricity shutdown for two or three days. For its more paranoid residents, the outage provoked notions of future calamitous breakdowns produced by ecological ruin on planet Earth — notwithstanding the Kyoto cleanup accords, as ratified by most countries, but not the United States, the biggest emitter of polluting greenhouse gases in the world.
So, when the computer-driven delivery systems for water, power, fuel, money and information did not crash upon the dawn of the triple-zero New Year, we privately excused ourselves for panicking. We still blame back-of-the-mind remembrances of all those credible new-millennium disasters foretold in the old century's science fiction. Not to mention the reinforcing warnings that total shutdown on Jan. 1, 2000, was as certain as the reality that the 1900s — when all computers had been programmed, mind you — were fading to black.
Vivid in the memory was the plausible account in 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, of the rebellion by HAL the computer (its name, by the way, the alphabetic letters preceding IBM). If HAL could go all human and bossy, as he fatally did in that 1968 book and film, why couldn't our machines ignore orders from the Command and Control keys? Or because their chips wouldn't know how to cope with time measured by dates with all those zeroes?
In any case — although strictly speaking the 21st century and the third millennium A.D. didn't truly start arithmetically until 2001 — the real-life shocks to the mind, body, spirit and purse in those startup stages of the 2000s are sure to make us look back on them at best as the oh-oh-oh years.
We painfully recall the way investors in the electronic communication industries proved ungrateful for the good computer behaviour during the Y2K transition. Dumping stock in those sectors became a rush before the new millennium was into its initial summer.
It's
easy to understand why Nortel Networks Corp. is Bay Street's
darling. Over the past year, the global telecommunications giant's
stock price has shot skyward by 230%, pulling the entire TSE 300 up
with it. And the news just keeps on getting better. In April 2000,
Nortel reported that its first quarter revenue was up by a whopping
48%. Immediately after the announcement, analysts started gushing...If
these analysts had done their homework, they might have come to a very
different conclusion....
— Al Rosen, Canadian
Business, May 29, 2000
And then we saw how bursting the tech-stock bubble proved contagious, dragging down markets and economies in the new decade's early years for the third time in a row, if not as steeply as in the 1981-82 and 1990-91 recessions.
Not only did savers and investors lose lots of money before the markets began recuperating in late 2002, but Canada and much of the world, meanwhile, had to deal with in-our-face realities as scary as the spooky things predicted for our times by clairvoyants of the 1900s.
The event never imagined in the wildest of such scenarios, of course, was the calamity christened "9/11," the code that still bespeaks the shock, the pain and the anger churned up by the airborne acts of suicidal terror against the United States by fundamentalist Muslims on Sept. 11, 2001.
The life-will-never-be-the-same-again anxiety provoked by the assaults on symbols of America's commercial and military superiority received apparent confirmation from the fundamentalist Christians in charge of the United States. It was vengeance by the sword and, in choosing targets, the avenger assumed the right to referee the sort of government and the kind of weaponry other nations are permitted to possess. In its declared War on Terror, Washington indeed appeared intent on making the new century the founding time of an American empire with a global reach.
But perhaps now that's not to be. By 9/11's second anniversary, developments and diversions raised questions about whether much was changing after all.
Investors
have taken a renewed interest in Air Canada stock. Since
hitting a low of $1.64 after Sept. 11, the share price has more than
quadrupled to the $6.60 range....
— Peter Verburg, Canadian Business - April 29, 2002
— Peter Verburg, Canadian Business - April 29, 2002
Argument over the invasion of Iraq now seems merely to turn the situation into a repetition of America's expensive, divisive and fruitless Vietnam War years of 1965-75 rather than something historically unique.
And as the killing in Iraq raged into November, and the U.S. budget deficit soared to troubling heights, events elsewhere have begun to prompt questions about just whose century this is really likely to be. Prominent candidates are the quarter of the earth's population living in thriving China, sponsor of an inaugural manned space flight in mid-October and self-confident enough to shrug off U.S. pressure to revalue its currency in favour of competing traders.
As for Canada, our recent blighting domestic disturbances — Air Canada's filing for bankruptcy protection, the SARS outbreak in Ontario, the mad cow case that cut off cattle exports, British Columbia's fires and floods, hurricane Juan in the Maritimes — drained urgency from the War on Terror. Ontario, along with its American neighbours, also took a hit from a mid-August electricity shutdown for two or three days. For its more paranoid residents, the outage provoked notions of future calamitous breakdowns produced by ecological ruin on planet Earth — notwithstanding the Kyoto cleanup accords, as ratified by most countries, but not the United States, the biggest emitter of polluting greenhouse gases in the world.
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