New Year, 2010

I realized today that it's been 10 years since the Y2K scare. That scare is one of the landmarks I use to remember how long my partner and I have been together, since our relationship started the Thanksgiving before Y2K. I remember us going together to visit a friend of his, with the big worldwide millennium celebration playing on TV in the background.

Ten years... In a society that doesn't yet lend same-sex relationships the logistical support structure of marriage—though it's starting here and there—and where so many couples who do have that legal structure end up divorcing anyway, these ten years feel like an accomplishment. More importantly, I feel very grateful for these years together.

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As a kid, I watched the movie 2010 (pronounced "Twenty Ten," by the way, so when are people going to quit calling this year "two thousand ten"; we only said "two thousand" during years 0-9 because pronouncing 2009 "twenty nine" would be confusing, though I guess we could have said "twenty oh nine"; anyway, we didn't call 1999 "one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine," so why are we setting ourselves up now to be saying "two thousand ninety-nine"; sheesh, people, catch up already)... Anyway, as a kid I watched 2010, and that year was tantalizingly close enough to make you wonder "What will the world really be like then?" (not like the Star Trek movies, which were set so far in the future that they might as well have been set in a realm of pure fantasy); but that year also felt far enough away that you couldn't really wrap your mind around the fact that you would, presumably, live to it, not in the same way you envisioned what you'd be doing in just a year or two...

But now here we are. Living the future. No manned spaceships travelling to Jupiter, though. And the Soviet Union's an anachronism, though at the time the movie was made, its longevity just seemed like something you had to take for granted. Of course the Soviet Union would still be around in 2010. Just as you take for granted that the United States will still be around in, say, 2050. Won't it?

I grew up as a kid taking it for granted that by the time I reached the year 2000, the world would be caving in under the calamities leading up to the Second Coming. I quite seriously imagined that as a draftable young adult, I would have to be on the run as a draft dodger to avoid being sent by the U.S. government to fight against the nation of Israel in the battle of Armageddon. When I was in high school, in the late 1980s, I assumed that by the late 1990s there would probably have been a nuclear war. These beliefs weren't active in my life in the sense that I actually planned around them. I wasn't holing up in the mountains; I was preparing for college and some kind of future career on the assumption that the system would be around indefinitely. But in the back of my mind, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be.

Looking back, I find it a strange way to have lived. Now I live with no mental roadmap for the future. I take nothing for granted anymore. There are no prophecies telling us how the story will end. We've been given sketches of what God would like the future to look like. But whether that happens or not depends, collectively, on the agency of the human family.

OK, I admit it: I still live my life assuming, in the back of my mind, that I'll probably live to see Western civilization collapse; to see global warming soar out of control; to see the electrical grid go dead, and the Internet and all the vital information on it dissolve like a mist. I think it's entirely possible that when I die, it will be of starvation. That's partly just the apocalyptic frame of mind I was schooled in as a Latter-day Saint; but it's also because the people running the show aren't giving me much reason to be more optimistic.