Word: y2k
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Then there's Harrison, Ark., a quiet Ozarks farm town (pop. 11,611) that is becoming a mecca for anyone who fears the worst from the computer bug. Up to 100 local citizens there attend twice-monthly meetings of a group called Y2K Watch. And in August, a Y2K town meeting brought at least 700 people to an auditorium at North Arkansas College. "My purpose was not to scare anyone but to begin talking about economic self-sufficiency," says former mayor Dan Harness, who organized the gathering, which had representatives from a local utility, a bank, hospital and phone company...
...years ago, concerns about Y2K helped persuade Jerry and Carolyn Head to move from a suburb of Dallas to an 85-acre farm near Harrison. The Heads don't think of themselves as survivalists. "Most of them are nuts," says Jerry, 51. "We're planners," explains Carolyn, 52, a teacher who homeschools daughter Sarah, 17, and son David, 14. (Their son Lesley, 23, also lives at home.) For them, planning has meant buying a home generator, a 1,000-gal. propane tank and a small flock of chickens. The Heads expect cash to be useless for a while after Y2K...
...worry in some parts of Washington is that even if most Y2K problems are ironed out, pre-2000 panic could have a real impact. If people are worried about the stability of the economy, they might pull their money out of the stock market, which, if nothing else, would cause real dips in the market. Bank runs stoked by fear could be as bad as actual computer-generated bank problems, says Senator Robert Bennett, the Utah Republican who heads the Senate's Year 2000 committee. As a precaution, the Federal Reserve plans to print an extra $50 billion...
...vegetables, fruit, milk, meat substitutes and cooking aids sells for $1,495 plus shipping. Until about 1995, the company did most of its business with Mormons, who stockpile food as a principle of their faith. More recently, however, as much as 90% of sales have been to non-Mormons. "Y2K is driving the worry," says office manager Roslyn Niebuhr. Because monthly sales have zoomed from $300,000 in December 1977 to $4 million last November, the company has quadrupled its dealerships...
...Y2K alarmists have no such concerns about how their post-millennium credibility will stand. The impulse to find signs of the Second Coming and all its attendant disasters is a durable one. It can thrive in the face of continuing disappointments. All the same, in the probable event that the world does not come undone next year, academics like Richard Landes, director of Boston University's Center for Millennial Studies, expect that alarmists "will be totally discredited. Millennialism will fade rapidly." His group has a theme chosen for the 2002 edition of the International Conference on Millennialism: "Millennial Disappointment...