On This Day Pre-Y2K
Confused by any of the jargon you see below? Check the Y2K Glossary!
December 23, 1998 Permalink
Started with my wife and extended to our immediate families over the last year. Some awful scenes. Left them alone and started preparing. Nickle finally dropped for some of them when I told them that I purchased the retreat. Now they phone and say, hey I saw something on y2k that you were saying 6 months ago. My advice is this, if you worry about saving everyone, you will get into a depressive state because your words go unheeded, but your deeds may not. Quietly execute your plan. They will get there, eventually one hopes.
—Rick Reilly, Time Bomb 2000 Forum (LUSENET), 12/23/98
TV will eventually fuel the panic. Let a line of depositors show up at a bank to pull out their money, and local TV will run it that night. The next day, five banks will be hit. The national TV crews will show up the next week, hoping for an interview with a frantic depositor or two and a nervous banker. The banker can tell the crew, “There’s nothing to worry about.” It doesn’t matter what he says. The lines in front of the banks are what the viewers will remember.
Which scene keeps the TV audience: a programmer going through line after line of code or some guy with a cabin in the woods, stocked with food, a Baygen wind-up short wave radio, and a shotgun over the door? Which will the viewer remember?
The “we’ve got it just about solved” crowd will have to be satisfied with print media. The survivalists will get most of the air time.
Scene after scene, month after month: the TV message of preparation for disaster will push millions of viewers toward panic.
—Gary North, garynorth.com, 12/23/98
