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2021 : The Year of Apprehension
The COVID-19 pandemic, the battered democracy, the turbulence of racial and economic struggles — this is definitely the Year of Apprehension. We’ll probably all survive. Even if a lot of people continue to suffer and die and need our attention.
Given the difficulty of looking ahead, I dug into the archives for a look back. New Year blogs — and a bunch of New Year stories that pre-date the era of the blog — turn out to offer many bright spots and a little reassurance.
New Year’s 2000 — That one was fun. Remember the Y2K problem? The Millennium Bug? Computers everywhere, unequipped to deal with this new digit coming after 1999, would be crashing and burning and taking us all down with them? My husband and I actually attended a somewhat subdued New Year’s Eve dinner party at which one of the other guests was an official of a global engineering company which will remain un-named. He spent the evening with an ostentatious black box at hand — during dinner he did get it off the table and into his lap — because of mysterious dangers that might need his immediate attention at the stroke of midnight. We followed that stroke across time zones. Our highest moments of hilarity were speculating about exactly what that black box was going to do to us all when he pushed his magic button; our engineer friend was not amused. The covid bug does make the Y2K bug seem quaint.
