What Will You Do When the Chips Are Down?
By David Palm
Illustration by Patrick Kelly

Is the Y2K problem a kind of modern-day Tower of Babel story?

There is an arrogance in much of Western culture that assumes our technology gives us not only the ability, but the license to do as we please. And that technological license has been used in some incredibly evil ways.

Perhaps God has in mind to let that very technology be our undoing. If so, it is a time for great hope.

John woke up shivering in the chill of the early spring morning. His wife, Margaret, and their four children slept bundled in the extra blankets he'd given them. He was glad that warmer weather was coming so that he wouldn't have to spend the night tending the wood burning barrel stove he'd plumbed into the fireplace chimney.

John got up and padded softly to the kitchen, struck a match to light the gas stove and put a pot of water on to boil. He rummaged through the cabinets for a bite to eat, suppressing the growing knot in his stomach as he noticed how empty the cupboards were. "Lord, help me find work today." After sipping his coffee and quaffing a slice of bread, he pulled on his boots and jacket and went out into the misty morning. "Maybe today there'll be a job," he thought, as he trudged down to the factory to join the lengthy queue of desperate men.

The scenario above is not a prediction of the future but a scene from the not-so-distant past. John lived during the Great Depression. Maybe he's your grandfather. Certainly, there are many people still alive today who remember the time when our nation's economy was turned upside down. After the great stock market crash took its toll, many middle-class urban and suburban dwellers found themselves faced with living conditions very different than those they were accustomed to. A devastated economy dictated a radically new lifestyle.

It Can't Happen to Me

It is difficult for many of us who live in the United States — especially my generation, which cannot remember anything but relatively good times — to conceive of anything like a total collapse of our economy. We tend to assume that the good times are our right by birth and must go on forever; with the scoffers of biblical times, we assume that "all things have continued as they were from the beginning" (2 Peter 3:4). And yet the lessons of history warn us against such presumption. All you have to do is live long enough and you will see the collapse of your economy, society and nation. That's an indisputable fact since all civilizations eventually collapse, sometimes slowly and sometimes very quickly. What is disputable is just when that will happen in a given society.

Many Christians are beginning to sense there are serious rifts in our social fabric, as evidenced by rising crime rates, drug use, pornography, abortion and a host of other indications. Those things represent a kind of slow, cancerous rot, all the more insidious because of their gradual evolution. There are other threats to social order which are sudden and even catastrophic. Often those who trumpet this or that looming catastrophe are viewed as being slightly off their nut and hence, ignored. And yet history tells us that national catastrophes can and do happen and, if current trends coupled with historical cycles mean anything, perhaps we're overdue. One such potential threat looming very close is a computer problem variously known as the Millennium Bug, the Year 2000 Problem or often just Y2K for short. Like many perceived threats, people differ on how serious it will be. Some consider it a trivial annoyance or dismiss it as a scam concocted by computer consultants to make big bucks from manufactured fear. Others predict it will literally be "the end of the world as we know it" (for which there is a neat new acronym, T.E.O.T.W.A.W.K.I.). The majority of people knowledgeable about Y2K populate the spectrum between those two poles.

For the record, I fall short of predicting T.E.O.T.W.A.W.K.I. — in fact, I don't predict anything — but I'm taking Y2K very seriously indeed. I'm a software engineer by profession. I think I have a pretty good grasp of both the technical difficulties involved in fixing this problem and the incredible scope of the businesses and government agencies affected by it. My study leads me to conclude that there is significant probability of serious disruption of our government and economy at large - and that goes double for our major trading partners, like Europe and Japan, who lag far behind the U.S. in fixing the bug.

But my concern about Y2K goes deeper than the immediate problem and its ramifications. Thinking about the potential social impact of something like Y2K has gotten me to ponder more broadly how our society would react to serious economic deprivation. A society that decides it's OK to abort its children by the millions when the economy is good isn't likely to be kinder and gentler if the Dow takes a serious tumble. Closer to home, it has me thinking about how I would react. Hey, I'm as glad as the next person for the good economy and, frankly, I don't want my relatively easy and good life to change drastically. But what if it did? I fear that I too fall into the lethargic assumption that the good times will always be with us and so am just as ill prepared — both materially and spiritually — as the population in general if really bad times come. So the larger question behind this specific problem of Y2K is: How would I live out my Catholic Faith differently if faced with economic and social catastrophe?

What's The Problem?

For those who don't understand exactly what the Year 2000 Problem is, a short explanation will help. Storage space on early mainframe computers was very, very expensive and had to be conserved at all costs. Programmers got into the habit of representing a calendar year using just two digits instead of four (using 87 for 1987, for example). Although the savings seem trivial today, when even home computers have gigabytes of hard drive space, back then the savings of just a few digits per entry in a large database were measured in tens of millions of dollars.

Programmers writing software twenty, thirty, even forty years ago assumed that the code they were developing would be replaced and upgraded long before the year 2000 rolled around. Unfortunately, two things have happened. First, the software has not been upgraded; many of these "legacy" programs are still handling critical functions in business and government. And second, the convention of using just two digits to represent the date had become so ingrained that, incredibly, programmers have continued to write software like this, right into the 1990s.

Now for the problem. Programs using the two digit scheme are written to assume the first two digits in the date are 19; so 54 equals 1954, 89 equals 1989, and so on. But when the year 2000 rolls around, these programs will not know that 00 means 2000, but rather, will interpret it as 1900. So any calculations based on the date will be wrong. For example, my age can currently be calculated by subtracting my birth year, 64, from the current year 98 to get 34 years. But in the year 2000, a typical computer program will subtract 64 from 00, making me negative 64-years-old. What happens when the computer reaches that result is highly unpredictable. It may go happily along propagating that erroneous answer through all kinds of other calculations which are then incorrect. It may start throwing out error messages in mass quantity, effectively rendering its services useless. Or it may just shut down the entire computer system. All of these results and more have been documented as  results of Y2K tests.

How Widespread Is This Problem?

It's sometimes hard to get a grasp on just how completely dependent we are on our computers. Simply put, our modern economy cannot function without them. Banking is almost entirely computerized; the Federal Reserve Bank's Fedwire service alone transfers over $280 trillion in currency and $180 trillion in securities annually. All of the world's financial markets — stocks, bonds, commodities, futures — would cease to function without their computers. One ubiquitous facet of our society that's highly dependent on computers is government at every level: local, state and federal. The departments that handle tax collection, Social Security, Medicare, air traffic control, welfare payments, national defense, etc. are now so huge in scope and so thoroughly reliant on their computers that there really isn't any option of going back to "paper and ink." Our telecommunications — land-line phones, cellular phones, communications satellites, even radio and television stations — are completely computerized. And modern manufacturing is heavily dependent on robotic controls on the factory floor and computerized inventory and tracking systems for its distribution.

Speaking of distribution, all trucking, railroad and airline traffic is now scheduled, routed and tracked by computer. Trains, for example, are switched entirely electronically; the manual switches of a few decades ago have been dismantled. Air traffic control is computer driven and, indeed, IBM has put the FAA on notice that the core mainframe computers used for national air traffic control are not Y2K compliant and that IBM will neither guarantee their proper function nor support them past the year 2000. And the lifeblood that keeps all of this running — electricity, oil, natural gas — is produced in drilling, pumping, processing and generation plants that are themselves wired with hundreds and often thousands of individual computerized controllers.

Individual failures in these vital industries do occasionally occur through labor strikes, power failures or weather. Such disruptions are unpleasant, but tolerable; people manage to muddle through. But it's the interdependency between all of these vital systems that has the top tier of Y2K worriers most concerned. We get glimpses of the so-called "domino effect," where a single failure sets off a chain reaction of problems, when something like the U.P.S strike of a year ago sends a shock wave through the U.S. economy; few people realize that a significant number of small businesses went bankrupt before they could find alternative carriers. But the U.P.S. strike is a single, contained event of limited scope and duration. Y2K threatens to be quite different. It affects every part of our government, economy and infrastructure. It is global in scope. Never before has modern society faced the prospect of a multitude of worldwide and simultaneous infrastructure breakdowns, across the entire spectrum of business and government operations. No one knows what kind of ripple effect such disruptions might have.

So Fix It, Already!

OK, the code is broken and there will be big problems if it's not fixed. But hey, this is the country that put a man on the moon. We are a "can do" society. This stuff about dates seems almost too trivial to be taken seriously. So fix it already! Unfortunately, it's not so simple. Sometimes commentators on the Y2K problem dismiss its importance with statements like, "This is an easy problem to fix," or "C'mon! This is Programming 101 stuff." There's an element of truth to this viewpoint. By and large, the individual changes to the computer programs are relatively easy to make. But the "It's an easy problem to fix" crowd fails to factor in a few considerations. First, while individual programs are relatively easy to fix, the sheer scope of the problem turns individually easy fixes into a collectively gigantic task. The total base of computer programs worldwide runs to an estimated 180 billion lines of Y2K-susceptible code. Even with automated tools, wading through that much code to find and fix the effected parts of the programs is daunting due to the sheer size of the task.

Second, many of these programs are written in computer languages that have long since fallen out of favor in the computer industry. There aren't a lot of people left who are fluent in these languages; a study conducted in 1997 by Howard Rubin of Hunter College finds that there will be a shortage of 500,000-700,000 programmers in the U.S. alone. And in many cases, the documentation for the programs is incomplete or missing altogether, making modifications that much more difficult and risky.

Third, it's well documented that programmers fail to catch bugs and routinely introduce additional bugs into programs that they are trying to fix. Capers Jones, a noted computer scientist, says, "With possibly 5% to more than 20% of the year 2000 problems still unrepaired and remaining in software after the century ends, the probability of significant damages is alarmingly high. . . . It is naåve and risky to assume that 100% of year 2000 errors will be found and repaired, since the U.S. average for other kinds of bugs is only about 85% defect removal efficiency and even 'best in class' results are below 99% in efficiency" ("Probabilities of Year 2000 Damages," http://www.year2000. com/archive/nfproby2k.html; my emphasis). Testing cannot be minimized in hopes of squeaking past the deadline. The California 2000 White Paper, published by the California Department of Information Technology, estimates that at least 40% of the time allocated to a successful Y2K project must be used for testing. If a company started its Year 2000 project in 1996 and is not yet done changing the code, they don't have enough time to test adequately (agencies such as the Social Security Administration started their repairs in 1991 and are still not done). So on the one hand, the existing programs will not work properly past the year 2000, and on the other hand the "fixed" programs likely will not work 100% properly either.

Fourth, those who downplay the difficulty of fixing the Year 2000 problem frequently focus on microcomputer and mainframe computer applications. Frankly, the problem there is bad enough. But this leaves aside what may be the most intractable problem of all, embedded controllers. Microprocessors have been designed into a vast array of industrial and commercial systems. Things like power plants, gas and oil refineries, manufacturing facilities, mining operations, medical equipment and weapons systems are all heavily reliant on their computerized controllers. It's estimated that some 25-40 billion micro controllers have been manufactured in the last 10 years. An estimated 2%, or 500-800 million of them, operate with date-sensitive data and are ripe for Y2K failures. Many of these controllers are outdated, poorly documented or in physically difficult positions, like 1000 feet under water at the base of an oil drilling rig. And there's no question that there are serious Year 2000 sensitivities in embedded control applications. Capers Jones says that, "experiments by electric companies to test out their year 2000 repairs have indicated worse problems and longer outages than anyone envisioned. These date problems are found in every form of electric generation: hydro electric, coal and nuclear. They are often obscure and difficult to both find and fix." David Hall, an embedded systems consultant, told a group of 80 congressional aides that, "Every test I have seen done on an electrical power plant has caused it to shut down. Period. I know of no plant or facility investigated to this date that has passed without Y2K problems" (quoted on The Netly News: Afternoon Line, May 13, 1998). And a spokesman for GM described the failure of the robotic manufacturing systems in one plant during a Year 2000 test as "catastrophic" (Fortune Magazine, April 27, 1998).

Fifth, the vast majority of companies started their Year 2000 projects too late. A survey of over 6000 companies and government agencies by the Gartner Group found that 25% of them had yet to start a Year 2000 remediation program as of March 1998 (Information Week, 9 April 1998). A Wells Fargo Bank study of U.S. small businesses found that, "Fully 19% of small businesses haven't even heard of the problem. . . . And among the small businesses that are familiar with the potential catastrophe, three-fourths of them have yet to take action on it. Worse, 50% of the firms have no plan to act" ("Y2K Worries," Industry Week, 20 July 1998).

The bottom line is that there is a tremendous amount of work to do, with not enough time and too few people to do it. Studies show that, on average, 15% of all software projects are late and 25% are canceled before completion (see Capers Jones, Patterns of Software Systems Failure and Success; International Thomson Computer Press, 1996). The numbers get worse for large projects. Historically, projects that compare in size to many Y2K projects are late between 15-20% of the time and 30-65% are canceled before completion, although canceling mission-critical Y2K projects is a rather grim option. So, statistically speaking, a significant portion of the computer systems in major businesses and government agencies will not be fixed by the time the year 2000 rolls around.

This is the single most important fact that caused me to begin to take Y2K very seriously. Once one does a little digging beneath optimistic assurances, it becomes clear the probability that all vital business and government services will complete their work on time is just about zero. Says Senator Bob Bennett of Utah, "In fact, the time to solve the entire problem is gone. We do not have enough time. . . . We have to set our priorities, and say these portions of the Y2K problem have to be solved because they're mission critical — [and] these are ones we will get to if we have enough time," (Deseret News, 29 April 1998). Sen. Bennett's honest admission suggests that disruptions are inevitable. How large will they be? It's impossible to say. Could they actually bring about T.E.O.T.W.A. W.K.I.? Frankly, yes. Speaking to journalists at the USIA Foreign Press Center on August 6, John Koskinen, the chairman of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, said, "[There are a lot] of people who are saying that basically the world will stop. And these aren't, as I've said, the people you normally think of as alarmists . . . . Normally, you kind of dismiss these alarmist views out-of-hand. But with this problem, you can't dismiss them out-of-hand, in terms of that it is never going to happen."

What Does It Mean For Us?

In his book Timebomb 2000, Ed Yourdon, a prominent computer scientist and now a kind of Y2K "Paul Revere," analyzes the potential physical disruptions brought on by the bug in terms of four time frames: disruptions lasting 2-3 days, one month, one year and ten years. He considers disruptions of the 2-3 day variety to be a virtual certainty, those lasting one month to a year to be quite possible and worth planning for and those of the ten year variety to be extremely unlikely. But disruptions of a month to a year are serious enough to consider taking some very practical and concrete personal action.

On the spiritual front, it's worth asking whether this, or some other major social disruption, could serve as an opportunity for grace in the life of the Church. There are some Catholics who see a convergence between looming social and economic events and the many Marian apparitions that warn the world repentance is needed or God's judgment is imminent. And many non-Catholic Christians have begun to fit Y2K into elaborate prophetic schemes. I don't think there is any necessary connection between a particular prophetic outlook or apparition and Y2K; it's a technological problem and doesn't have an obvious link to God's direct intervention. On the other hand, in my opinion, our society is indeed ripe for God's judgment and it doesn't seem farfetched to me to see the Y2K problem as a kind of modern-day Tower of Babel story. There's a boastful arrogance in much of Western culture that assumes our technology gives us not only the ability, but the license to do as we please. And that technological license has been used in some incredibly evil ways. Perhaps God has in mind to let that very technology be our undoing. If so, it's a time for great hope. Salvation history shows us that judgment is always followed by blessing, if the people turn their hearts again toward God. But it may also be a time for God's people to prepare themselves for what lies ahead.

Could There Be a Domino Effect?

Sometimes the discussion about Y2K gets derailed in the media through trivial examples. Journalists present the problem in terms of microchips in toasters or VCRs and then ask what all the broohaha is about. Let's face it, it's not exactly an event of apocalyptic proportions when your computerized toaster goes on the fritz. But this oversimplification is really a distortion of the true scope of the problem. Consider, for example, the fuel you pump to run your car. Typical gasoline begins its life as crude oil found on the bottom of the ocean. Crude is pumped by an off-shore oil rig that is packed to the rafters with electronic controls: "An offshore platform may have 10,000 or more embedded silicon chips governing all automated and even some manual processes. Many of these systems are subsurface or underwater and physically difficult to access" (S. M. Shemwell, J. Dake and B. Friedman, World Oil, April 1998, Vol. 219 No. 4). The oil pumped from the ocean floor is poured into an ocean-going oil tanker which is itself full of computerized navigation and load-handling equipment. The tanker steams to port and off-loads its cargo onto railroad tank cars. The route for those cars is planned, switched and tracked entirely by computer. The rail cars arrive at an oil refinery where the crude oil undergoes the complex process needed to get gasoline. The refinery relies on thousands of microcontrollers to handle various facets of the refining process and a host of mainframe and microcomputers to manage accounting and inventory operations. Gasoline from the plant is then pumped back into railroad tank cars which are routed via computerized controls to a centralized point from which it is distributed throughout the country in semi-trailer tankers, which are themselves routed and tracked by computer. Finally, if none of those links in the computerized chain is broken, one of these tankers reaches the gas station in your neighborhood and from there you fill your car and drive away — that is, if your electronic credit card transfer goes through properly and your car has no Y2K-sensitive controllers in it. But it would not take more than a few Y2K-related failures anywhere along that chain of literally tens of thousands of microcontrollers and computers to end in empty tanks at the gas station. And there does not seem to be enough time to remedy the problem. Industry analysts say that, "It is estimated that the average oil and gas firm, starting [in April, 1998], can expect to remediate less than 30% of the overall potential failure points in the production environment" (ibid.).

What Can We Do Personally?

There are a number of practical and material preparations that make good sense in the face of Y2K. Almost anybody can keep on hand enough food and water, extra blankets and spare batteries to last a couple of weeks or possibly even a couple of months. It would probably also be prudent to have some first aid supplies, an extra supply of any special medicines one needs and some spare cash.

I think the key is to keep oneself out of the way of potentially desperate crowds. In the face of any looming disaster, natural or otherwise, there tends to be swarms of people frantically depopulating grocery and hardware store shelves. In this case, there could also conceivably be runs on banks to withdraw cash. It's best to have these things ahead of time and so be able to stay safely at home rather than to venture out into that fray.

One might also want to consider the allocation of financial assets. I am not a financial adviser, nor do I play one on TV, so nothing I say should be taken as advice. But it might be time to reconsider the wisdom of investments like very aggressive stock portfolios. It also seems a very good time to think about debt elimination. By and large, what you own free and clear cannot be taken away from you even in hard economic times and there is a real freedom in being free from personal debt. Y2K has been a catalyst for my wife and me to pare down our own debt as rapidly as possible.

What about location? Is there any advantage to living in rural or semi-rural areas versus large metropolitan areas where there is a proportionally larger number of things that can go wrong? Some people think so. There are individuals and families who are literally "heading for the hills" over Y2K, that is, they are moving out of urban centers to more rural parts of the country. For example, Ed Yourdon sold his family's New York City condo to move into a small home in rural New Mexico. This is an intensely personal decision that must be based on an analysis of the seriousness of the problem, the potential for obtaining employment in a new location and family considerations.

The key to all preparations for Y2K is to make sure you can live with them no matter what the outcome. Only do things that make sense for you whether Y2K is severe or relatively mild. Think of personal preparation as a kind of insurance policy: analyze the Y2K "risk" and then decide how much "coverage" you need. If it turns out that nothing happens and you didn't need your policy after all, then great; who buys car insurance hoping to get into an accident just so he doesn't feel like he's wasted the money? But if Y2K turns out to be a real catastrophe, then we'll all be glad for whatever preparations we made ahead of time.

On a spiritual level, preparation for Y2K presents us with a unique challenge to our propensity to grow lethargic, lazy and comfortable. It confronts our deeply rooted materialism. Ponder for a moment the thought of losing the majority of your material possessions. How would you respond if social unrest rendered your up-until-now perfectly safe neighborhood unlivable? It can't happen? Tell that to the residents of Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, formerly one of the most beautiful and serene cities of Europe. What would happen to your relationship with God if a knock on the door was followed by orders to pack only what you can fit in the family's mini van and get ready to move out in two hours? Could you walk away from virtually all of your worldly possessions and still give thanks to the Lord for his goodness and grace in your life (1 Thess. 5:18)? Honestly, I don't know if I could. But I think that means I haven't yet grasped something fundamental about the Gospel and Christ's call to total surrender (Luke 9:23-25).

Contemplating the potential loss of a significant portion of our material assets can prod us to cultivate a spirit of detachment. Scripture tells us to "seek first the kingdom of God" and let God worry about material needs. Here is where our Catholic heritage holds us in good stead, for the spirit of poverty and radical detachment finds many holy adherents in our history. We can be instructed by the tremendous examples of St. John the Baptist, St. Jerome, St. Anthony of the Desert and St. Francis of Assisi. I was moved recently to learn that at her death, the sum of Mother Teresa's possessions consisted of two changes of clothes, a Bible and a rosary. Not all of us are called to such radical poverty, but all of us are called to detachment commensurate with the demands of the Gospel.

The positive corollary to a spirit of detachment from material things is cultivation of a spirit of generosity. It can be relatively easy to be generous when one has plenty (although the relative riches possessed by all middle class Americans present spiritual obstacles of their own). But I would wager that generosity takes on a new complexion when one is personally needy. And yet Scripture is replete with examples of the poor giving generously even from their poverty; one remembers the widow of Zarephath who shared her last bread with the prophet Elijah and another widow who gave her last two pennies at the Temple (cf. 1 Kings 17:8-24, Mark 12:41-44). And of course, meeting others' physical needs is an essential part of the Christian faith; the Scriptures say that without the willingness to share with others less fortunate, it's questionable whether we have true faith at all (cf. James 1-2).

We can also use this time to cultivate a spirit of simplicity — learning to do without. The computerization of our businesses and manufacturing has made possible consumption — and waste — on a vast scale. One outcome of Y2K could be a vast curtailing of available goods and services, at least temporarily. Again, such shortages could be less of a systemic shock for us if we have already pondered that possibility and learned in small ways to deny ourselves now. I'm trying (with only partial success) to wean myself from coffee and soft drinks and learn to drink just plain water. This is a very small thing and yet it puts me in touch with a self-indulgent side of myself that needs taming. Perhaps we can use Lent of 1999 to practice self-denial in anticipation of some non-voluntary denial in the year 2000.

No-one likes to think this way. For me, it's a lot like thinking about death. My own death is an absolutely certain fact and yet I treat it in my mind almost as if it can't happen. The historic Catholic Faith suggests that we should all think more about death, in order to be better prepared to meet that certainty. Similarly, perhaps we should think more about the possibility that our way of life could end suddenly. The exercise itself can help us keep our eyes focused on the Lord rather than on the security of our lifestyle.

What To Read?

Timebomb 2000 by Edward and Jennifer Yourdon (Prentice Hall, 1997) is probably the best, most comprehensive introduction to the Y2K problem. Yourdon is a highly respected computer scientist whose professional reputation is now on the line because of his Y2K alarm-sounding. This book walks the reader through the broad scope of potential effects, including impact on government, transportation, communications, food distribution and utilities. A second edition of the book appeared recently and selected chapters are available on Yourdon's excellent Web site at www.yourdon.com. An excellent and detailed planning guide to get your personal finances in order for Y2K is Year 2000: Personal Protection Guide by J. R. Morris (Sterlingmoor Publishing, 1998; www.y2kpersonal.com). And another resource documenting the problem and providing personal planning suggestions for a "worst case scenario" is What Will Become of Us? by Julian Gregori (International Crisis Management Center, 1998; www.ethell.com/y2k/y2k.html). Byte Magazine's July cover article ("Year 2000 Survival Guide") gives a great comprehensive overview of the problem. And the August issue of Wired Magazine offers a provocative look at several professional programmers who have decided that Y2K is sufficiently threatening to warrant serious plans to head for the hills ("The Y2K Solution: Run For Your Life!"). The September, 1998 issue of The Economist magazine has an article by Francis Cairncross, who gives a sober and well written analysis of the Y2K problem and its possible effects. The article is available on the Web at www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/ 19-9-98/index_survey.html. A Web site that provides a balance of views, with the majority inclining toward some degree of optimism is The Year 2000 Information Center at www.year2000. com. By all means, one should read a variety of materials when evaluating Y2K; a steady diet of doomsayers can easily be balanced with alternative views. A Web site that provides a wealth of general and technical information about Y2K is: ADNet's Y2K page at www.zdnet.com/zdy2k. For excellent ideas for personal preparation, visit the Web site hosted by The Cassandra Project at millennia-bcs.com/nfcass.htm. I like the community awareness emphasis of the Project. They believe that working together with neighbors and the larger community is essential to a hopeful outcome from Y2K. I agree. And in my opinion the best Web site on Y2K is hosted by Dr. Gary North. Be advised that this is pretty apocalyptic stuff. North has been predicting a major financial collapse for decades, without any Year 2000 problem on the horizon; so far, of course, he has been consistently wrong. He has a personal stake in something bad happening to our economy, so his personal "spin" should be read in light of his religio-political agenda. But the data on Y2K that he has compiled on his Web site is truly impressive — and sobering. You'll find it at www.garynorth.com.

What Can We Do Collectively?

Individual preparation is certainly prudent, but what's to be done on a larger scale? Catholic apologetics and evangelism has experienced a real renaissance in the past ten years. A lot of our venues are mass media channels; we distribute cassette tapes, do apologetics on the Internet via e-mail and Web sites and provide television and radio programming on global satellite networks. But an event like Y2K could change much of that. Evangelism could go back to being done predominantly the old fashioned way: face to face and in person.

This means that a Catholic intent on making the most of bad times would want to become more comfortable verbalizing the faith, rather than relying too heavily on others to communicate Catholic truth. We can all thank the Lord for Scott Hahn and others like him who are able to communicate with such clarity and verve, but in the end the onus is still on us to bring the message of Christ and the Catholic Faith into somebody's living room. Y2K-induced disruptions and shortages would lead to a great many opportunities to share the Gospel with people who are confused and anxious. If you do make personal preparations for the year 2000, perhaps you should throw in a stockpile of tracts along with your supplies of food and water.

If you become convinced that Y2K presents a real threat in your community you could organize at your church. Many parishes already have relief ministries in place to feed and house the less fortunate; these could very easily be scaled up a bit to handle some greater-than-normal use in the event of the loss of services in the larger community. Great good can come from seemingly dire circumstances if Catholics are prepared both physically and spiritually to minister in stressful times.

Frankly, a serious disruption in the global economy could be extremely healthy for the life of the Catholic Church in the United States and would present all kinds of wonderful opportunities to reach out with the Gospel. Economic hardship and social chaos have a tendency to bring out peoples' religious instincts. It's a shame it takes a personal or national catastrophe to get some people to turn to God, but He's so gracious and merciful He will receive even crisis conversions with open arms. Parishes could become revitalized as lukewarm parishioners begin to take seriously their daily reliance on God rather than on their fast track job or growing stock portfolio. Rest assured, the God who could turn the disaster of the Crucifixion into the quintessential victory of the Resurrection can (and will) use any seemingly hopeless situation to bring glory to Himself and sinners to repentance.

And In the End...

The simple fact is that we don't know what will happen to our computers when the date rolls over to 2000; we've never faced this situation before and we don't yet know how much of the problem will be fixed in the next 12 months. It could be a flash in the pan and this article could be much ado about nothing. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence suggesting that it will indeed be a serious problem of global proportions. What I have tried to do is raise your awareness about the specific problem that faces the world in the next year. But this goes beyond urging folks to stockpile food and equipment so they're ready for any physical contingency. It's also about looking at our hearts, asking how dear our lifestyle is to us and how closely our personal security is linked to material prosperity. It's about pondering the possibility that a massive conversion of souls, and thence of society at large, may be wrought in the first years of the twenty-first century as it was in the turbulent first. And for the Catholic who wishes to see revival in the Church and in the land during the third Christian millennium, that's very good news indeed. For the Church is never stronger than when she is following her Savior along the way to the Cross.