No Y2 chaos

Challenge to the doomsayers: Where's the evidence? | Joel Belz

The final countdown on the big Y2K clock has begun, and it's tempting to say that it's anybody's guess just how bad it's going to be.

But it's not just anybody's guess. Things aren't going as badly as the doubters hoped they would. With just over 60 days to go, a few of the scaremongers, including some who have advertised here in the pages of WORLD, are raising their voices, as if to make up in volume what they have already lost in accuracy. But the evidence grows every day that the major dislocations some have predicted for the global economy and for society in general are very unlikely to happen.

For one thing, we've already passed a handful of dates that were once forecast to be precursors of the really bad date, Jan. 1, 2000. Thursday, Sept. 9, for example, was predicted by some to be a mini-disaster because it would show up as 9/9/99 in so many high-tech devices-which, the prophets of doom said with near certainty, could interpret a string of nines only as an instruction to shut the computer completely down. But, of course, you have read of no computers shutting themselves down on Sept. 9.