Two Celebrations for the New Decade
Remember 2000 and how that was supposed to be the beginning of the new millennium, and how the following year, we were being corrected?
Before the confusion presented itself, big times were scheduled on the last night of the 1990s. I didn’t have any special plans, but I was a part of it regardless, and I was more than apprehensive, because it meant the end of something big. And with all the Y2K talk, there were even rumors about the end of the world.
Back in those uneasy days, there was also talk among the religious Christians and the not-so-religious ones that those many images of Jesus Christ holding up two fingers meant, “No, I’m not second-coming at the end of the first millennium, but actually, the second.”
Metaphorically speaking, I was holding my breath. It was coming, ticking off until it was just a couple of hours away. On the hour, every hour, different time zones were celebrating the end of the 1990s, and when it got to us, we were still alive, and the computers had not shut down. It was another year and nothing more. There was no robot take over, no World War III, and no alien invasion. After the massive party, we moved on.
But then 2001 was coming along and started to make claims that it was actually the beginning of the millennium. They were writing articles about how the new millennium did not start with 2000, but with 2001 and why.
If the century starts at 1 AD, that means the last year of that first century is 100 AD. Thus, 101 AD begins the new century. 2000 is the end of the old, not the beginning of the new.
There are stories that the first time the millennium turned over, the people of Europe thought it was the signal of the end of the world, that Christ was coming during the turn of the numbers. The turn seems far more dramatic when you think of 999 (which is 666 upside down — if that number even had any significance back then). Each 9 was replaced by a 0, plus an extra digit in front of everything. No other new year ever had such a change.
It could mean something that the change of a number like that might be more powerful than anything standard mathematics might have to offer. It may be why we talk about decades as if the tens place were more important than the order of natural numbers.
So when we talk about the roaring 20s, we are talking about a decade, certainly! And it most definitely helped that the 1920s started wonderfully and that toward the end of 1929, everything collapsed. A coincidence! Possibly it is a coincidence, but it became something meaningful.
Yet mathematically, that decade began at 1921, and that was the argument that the Year 2000 naysayers were trying to get across after the party was over. The problem was that nobody was listening.
Hell! by then, I couldn’t care less either. I was done with significant year ends, and the end of 2000 was just another number like everything else before it. The annoying omnipresence of Y2K could now finally be swept under the rug. I didn’t celebrate the erroneous millennium change with anything special, and I was not going to do it for 2001 with the corrected one.
For the first celebration, I had gone to Miami and took some time to rethink my life. Everything was upside down, and I was going to put my life through a makeover by returning to my ex-girlfriend. It was a noble effort, but our return only lasted a couple months. Then, toward the end of the year, I met someone else. On the second millennium bash, I went to Miami again and thought I had it all figured out, and I even brought with me the new woman that was going to make it all different. Just days after the new year when we returned to California, I saw her for the last time. There was a lesson here I was not yet grasping in those confusing days of great movements and new eras.
But there were countless people that made the most of it the first time, and when they learned that they were in fact wrong, that at the end of 2000 AD, they were still living in the 20th Century, they found an excuse to do it all over again. I suppose lost opportunities on that night of nights were made better the second time around. It is not often that in life we do get a second chance. Many of us don’t even get a first chance. But that 2001 piece of enlightenment might be seen as exactly that: the best type of positive experience!
So if people have it wrong now and really believe that we have already entered the third decade of the 21st Century in 2020, let them be. When they recognize the little slip at the end of this year, they will use it as a good reason for another celebration.