Silly Childhood Fears
In just a couple of days the calendar will be changing to 2010, which is even more significant considering its the start to an entirely new decade. No more of the single digit years, millennium babies are hitting the big 1-0 and soon we will be flung face first into the God-awful tweens and teens as the new decade marches on.
I graduated from high school in 2000, so my 10-year high school reunion will be taking place this next fall (assuming someone actually gets around to planning it), and that leads me to the memory of a conversation that took place in 1994.
At the ripe old age of 12, I was one of the big fish in the Elementary School pool. In class one day, we were assigned to groups of 6 or 8 people and told to get together and work on a presentation. My group was a little less than focused and, for whatever reason, were instead consumed with the thoughts of Y2K, which was 6 years away. We sat and talked for close to hour about how the world was going to end.
We all agreed it was completely unfair that we would only be 18 years old when the world ended. We wouldn't have been able to go to college, to drink alcohol, get married, have kids, travel the world. We were far too young to have our lives pulled out from under us like that, they needed to fix the Y2K bug and right away.
When we hit 2000, all of us in that group were still going to SHS and could all remember the fatalistic conversation that day in 6th grade. We laughed about how silly it was and how nice it was the bug was "fixed" and nothing in our lives had changed because the clocks had rolled over to a new millennium.
I am fairly certain if we all went to the high school reunion next fall, we could find each other and reminisce about our silly adolescent fears. We did all survive the fake cyber apocolypse and can sit back and chuckle about the stupidity of it all.
But that makes me curious, what current world fears will we laugh about in the next 10 years and what will come true? What suprises are in store for the 20-teens?
I graduated from high school in 2000, so my 10-year high school reunion will be taking place this next fall (assuming someone actually gets around to planning it), and that leads me to the memory of a conversation that took place in 1994.
At the ripe old age of 12, I was one of the big fish in the Elementary School pool. In class one day, we were assigned to groups of 6 or 8 people and told to get together and work on a presentation. My group was a little less than focused and, for whatever reason, were instead consumed with the thoughts of Y2K, which was 6 years away. We sat and talked for close to hour about how the world was going to end.
We all agreed it was completely unfair that we would only be 18 years old when the world ended. We wouldn't have been able to go to college, to drink alcohol, get married, have kids, travel the world. We were far too young to have our lives pulled out from under us like that, they needed to fix the Y2K bug and right away.
When we hit 2000, all of us in that group were still going to SHS and could all remember the fatalistic conversation that day in 6th grade. We laughed about how silly it was and how nice it was the bug was "fixed" and nothing in our lives had changed because the clocks had rolled over to a new millennium.
I am fairly certain if we all went to the high school reunion next fall, we could find each other and reminisce about our silly adolescent fears. We did all survive the fake cyber apocolypse and can sit back and chuckle about the stupidity of it all.
But that makes me curious, what current world fears will we laugh about in the next 10 years and what will come true? What suprises are in store for the 20-teens?
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