It was my junior year in public high school when Y2K swept by, banishing, in particular, the fevered talk of technological doom so peculiar to those days. I was a teenager then, and smirking came more easily than it does now. I must admit, however, that despite my contempt for popular currents of opinion, I used to wish that just one of the disasters might come true. Anything to bring real life one step closer to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, ya know…

Anyways, it was not long after these secret hopes fizzled that I espied a book left out for free on a table in our town library. The title, in serious red, white, and black, was “Spiritual Survival During the Y2K Crisis.” Thinking on what a nugget of cultural history I had found, I pocketed the book, and I’ve kept it ever since. Much cheer has it brought me, when I dredge it out, and read things like this:

Are you feeling the urge to panic? If this is your first exposure to such scenarios, you are probably feeling absolutely overwhelmed right now. Something inside you is saying, This can’t be true. How could it be true. God wouldn’t allow these things to happen. Believe me, there have been many mornings in the middle of my researcg for this book that I have awakened, looked outside, and said to myself, “Surely it will never happen.” And I have chosen to live that day like an ostrich with my head in the sand, in total denial. But then I have always come back to my computer and this book. And there it is again. Reality. In full living color.

Mary and I have gone through several stages of dealing with our increhsing Y2K awareness. After the first stage of denial came the stage of anxiety. There were weeks when neither one of us could sleep. One of us would wake up and find the other one up, and there we would be, both wide awake, both thinking about it. The burning question was always, How can we prepare?

Author Steve Farrar doesn’t just give you the scenarios, he wants you to know how to survive the crisis. Practical and informative advice. Biblically rendered. In full living color.

(Let me note, before I scandalize anyone, that this isn’t a Catholic work, to say the least.)

After Farrar gets through the basics, establishing what Y2K is going to be like (really, really bad), that you should hope for assistance from God (duh), and that you probably shouldn’t panic (double duh), he tries to set up a few guiding Christian principles for catastrophe. You’ve got the Joseph Principle, which means you should plan for the famine like Joseph did. Yup. Then you have the Acts principle, which means you should share like the first Christians - this is pretty basic stuff. Later come the chapters on the “First Bank of Jehovah-Jireh,” which describe many comforting incidents of Divine Providence, wherein God proves himself the only banker worth having, so to speak. All in all, there’s really nothing spiritually profound in it, as one might have surmised from the nature of the project.

Meaningful or not, there are reasons for my posting about it. I’m not usually one for hindsight mockery, but passages like these have prevented me from throwing it away, and are too much fun not to share:

Now I have a question for you. Quite a few people in our nation believe that the Year 2000 bug is going to be no big deal. But it seems that Bill Clinton isn’t one of them. If Y2K turns out to be serious, so serious that there are major power failures, runs on banks, a major downturn in the stock market, local communities without water, rioting and looting in cities when welfare recipients don’t get their checks, do you think it’s possible that Bill Clinton might view this situation as an emergency? And do you think that if he had the opportunity to take complete and total control of the nation through the Emergency Power Act, he would do it?

What I am saying is this. At such a point, with virtually no accountability to anyone, a man’s character would be the standard of the kind of leadership he would give in that situation. Knowing what you know about the character of Bill Clinton, are you comfortable with that scenario?

And here’s one more thought for you. After the crisis calmed down are you confident that he would quickly give back that power?

Whoa!

Seriously, though, what really brought this relatively worthless book ($0.01 on Amazon!) to my mind were the climate hearings I heard bits of on C-SPAN recently. I’ve always been fascinated by man’s penchant for imagining his own age in an apocalyptic way. For a number of reasons, to me, this whole global warming debacle is curiouser than most examples of this. The whispered scenarios are strikingly biblical, on the one hand, and yet, so far as I’ve seen, overtly religious types don’t seem very enthused. Also, the ecological catastrophe that’s envisioned (global changes in climate) all seems so - how to put it - natural? Personally, I think I would feel differently if we were talking about crude being pumped into the ocean, or koalas choking on aluminum cans, or another obvious case of man physically corrupting Creation. As it is, not only am I highly skeptical of any modern so-called scientific consensus (like this heliocentrism which our otherwise august President stubbornly maintains, in clear contradiction of St. Robert Bellarmine, Doctor of the Church…), I can’t quite understand why some folks don’t sleep nights for worrying. I don’t doubt that, in both these cases, Warming and Y2K, we’re partly witnessing the all-too-natural insecurity of the godless. But I do tend to wonder, in line with Biffi, what part the Antichrist is playing in all of this.