2001: a spatial oddity

If I had my druthers, gentle readers, at this point the tympani (that’s the big, brass kettle drum at the back of the orchestra) would thunder its ominous opening to Richard Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra so we could introduce the year 2001 properly. Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of working in print media is you can’t have any sound effects.
Okay, okay. Some of you might not recognize the name Thus Spake Zarathustra. But if I mentioned the theme music to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, you’d know what I was talking about. Actually, the music existed long before Stanley Kubric used it as the theme for his classic science fiction film. But then, I really don’t expect many folks to care one way of the other.
Also, Zarathustra was a Persian philosopher and teacher who lived long before the time of Christ. He taught that the human creature has the capacity to make itself better. Once again, I doubt that many people, who don’t already know that, are likely to give a hoot.
What I’m trying to say, in my own round about fashion, is that we have finally done it - we’ve actually made that big turn of a landmark calendar page. All hail 2001, the first year of a new century, a new millennium, a new age if you will.
Now, I realize that many of you seem to remember entering a new millennium last year, but you didn’t. That was just a mathematical mistake that got turned into an enormous marketing gimmick. All that really happened was you had to get accustomed to writing 2000 on your checks instead of 19-something, like you’d always done before.
But this time there’s no doubt about it. We’ve started a fresh set of 1,000 years. It is my sincere hope that they will be an improvement over the last 1,000, not that this would represent much of an accomplishment.
Let’s face it, gentle readers. The last 1,000 years have been pretty much of a bust. Oh, I know that, as a species, in the last 1,000 years we’ve come up with gun powder, printing with movable type, distilled petroleum products, the internal combustion engine, heavier-than-air flight, radiation therapy, penicillin, wireless communications like radio and television, miraculous medical advances like the Salk vaccine for polio, computers, laser technology, space travel and many other modern marvels.
But then there’s all the other stuff we’re responsible for - things like global war, using our communications media to deceive each other in ever larger numbers, the poisoning of our environment, the twisting of every technological development into some new method for either controlling or destroying the lives of our fellow humans. On average, we’ve lengthened the span of our lives but we’ve grown further and further apart doing it. We’ve even managed to cause thousands of different kinds of living things, things that we didn’t create to start with, to cease to exist at all.
In short, God gave us a garden and we’ve spent the past 1,000 years turning it into a sewer. The good things we’ve done don’t quite seem to balance the scales when measured against all of our villainy, do they?
Still, the Almighty is yet to brush us off completely, so there must be hope for us.
With this in mind, let us, indeed, welcome the new century, the new millennium, the new age with grateful anticipation. Maybe, just maybe, we won’t screw this one up as badly as we did the last one.