For shorthand they’re calling it the Y2K Crisis. You’ve heard by now, I presume about the absolute pandemonium that threatens to erupt when our calendars turn up three zero’s and our computer-dependent world goes bonkers because we’re using software programs that can’t recognize years that begin with a “2.”
Editor Mike Elgan of Windows Magazine says “it’s the biggest crisis the high-tech sector has ever faced.”
Already one major food company found its automated food handling system trashing tons of stock because confused computers labeled it with 1902 expiration dates. A huge bank was embarrassed when their fancy computers with 1900-based brains issued credit cards that should have been good well into the next millennium but were imprinted to expire in 1905.
Experts tell us that a third of all computer programs running in the year 2000 will become instantly obsolete. Preparing for Y2K, they say, could cost up to $600 billion. That’s a crisis, folks, by anybody’s calculation.
More costly to our nation than the computer woes of Y2K, however, and far longer lasting in its potential damage, is another crisis we face. We come to the year 2000 with our schools and corporations and governmental offices staffed by an increasing percentage of men and women whose hearts and minds simply are not wired to understand or react to the basic values of decency and integrity honored for centuries before us.
How long can our economic and political systems last when they are run by people who no longer know right from wrong and who have forgotten how to tell the truth?
I wouldn’t want to fly on an airplane inspected by agents who take bribes to ignore problems. Would you?
Would you take a pill, or drive a car, or trust a bridge made by a company that pays its employees to falsify safety tests? Chances are that you do!
How would you like to have a surgeon with bogus credentials? Or a textbook author who secretly despises everything our nation stands for? They’re out there. Americans are ingenious people. They will find ways to cope with the computer nightmares of Y2K. I’m sure of that. I do wonder, though, if we will wake up in time to reestablish the crumbling traditions of truth and trust that have made our kind of society possible.