LEONARD GRAY / L’Observateur / December 30, 1999

Welcome to the year 2000. Did the world get hit by a giant comet? Did allthe computers freeze up, with little curls of blue smoke coming out of the back? Did a massive atomic war break out? Is anyone left to read this? Keep in mind, this isn’t the 21st Century yet. That doesn’t start foranother year, on Jan. 1, 2001. Which means, of course, that the nextmillennium hasn’t started either.

Yes, this is still the 20th Century and still the second millennium since the birth of Christ.

Remember when you were a youngster and you wanted to go somewhere or do something and your parents would respond, “Oh, yeah! In the year 2000!”? You can go collect now. Get that pony you were denied in 1962 orthat Corvette they said later to in 1965.

Remember watching TV cartoons like “The Jetsons” and thinking by the time the year 2000 came along everyone would be living in floating houses and driving flying cars? How everyone would have personal jet-packs to fly around the area? There would be no poverty, instant gratification and robots would do all the work.

It’s still not here. We was gypped.Keep in mind, as our readers were reminded in Wednesday’s column by Lee Dresselhaus, that the year 2000 is a purely Christian invention, and Christianity isn’t even the largest religious group on the earth.

According to the “Old Farmer’s Almanac,” our year 2000 is 6713 in the Julien calendar, 5761 (starting at sunset on Sept. 20) in the Jewishcalendar, 4699 on the Chinese calendar, 1421 on the Islamic calendar, 1922 on the Indian calendar and 7509 on the Byzantine calendar.

Somehow, I don’t think Byzantines went ballistic when their calendar hit 7500. We should last so long.Doubtless, this day, there are a hoard of back-pedaling wannabe prophets who are revising their predictions. There’s any number of religious groupsnowadays who had their start as predicting doomsday. Then, when it didn’thappen, they provided a new doomsday date. Then, when it again didn’thappen, they made it more vague.

One religious group even says Armageddon has already happened and, except for their select group of 12,000 people, we’ve all already missed it.

And, to look at it another way, the year 2000 is based on the calculations of an obscure monk in the Dark Ages who was trying to estimate the date of the Nativity. According to many later Biblical scholars, the monk gotthe date wrong by four to six years.

Which means that 2000 years since the birth of Christ likely came in 1996 and again, we missed it.

Notable events in that fateful year included the re-election of Bill Clinton as president of the United States. No, I don’t think Bill Clinton is the AntiChrist, whatever Rush Limbaugh may say.

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