Millennial Mildness

The Third Millennium swept across America on a wave of public celebration that sputtered in rain-soaked Southern California, where outdoor celebrations were so poorly attended that Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan quipped that his citizens were “a bunch of sissies.”

As the New Year’s countdown headed toward Los Angeles, rain and fog shrouded the landmark Hollywood sign, threatening to shut down the city’s climactic ceremony. At least computer shutdowns and terrorist attacks failed to materialize as the long-awaited watershed on the Christian calendar approached the West Coast.

If there was a Y2K glitch loose in the land, it was the intermittent rain that fell on Southern California throughout the day, squelching outdoor celebrations, emptying streets, dampening preparations for the Rose Parade and cutting Disneyland’s projected attendance in half.

For every American who celebrated publicly, there were many more who were home as the clock slipped past midnight. The millions who chose more subdued celebration, or ignored the milestone, seemed abundant confirmation of what the public had been saying for weeks: It had grown tired and apprehensive over the relentless millennial buildup.

But others were determined to recognize the passing of an age of great achievement and adversity and to greet a new era that seems to hold boundless challenges and possibilities. President Clinton gave voice to those feelings at a White House tribute to American accomplishment.

“Never before have we known as much about each other. Never before have we depended so much on each other,” the president told luminaries from the worlds of art and athletics. “Never before have we had such an opportunity to move toward what the generations have prayed for--peace on Earth and a better life for all. We must both imagine a brighter future and dedicate ourselves to building it.”

In Washington, federal officials said computers appeared to be working normally, rolling over to the year 2000. State officials said they were so confident of computer systems that they had little to report at evening briefings.

“I want to pinch myself,” Gov. Gray Davis said. “It’s almost too good to be true.”

There were no reports of major violence anywhere in the United States.

Celebration in Las Vegas

Las Vegas was one of the few Western cities striving to live up to the millennial buildup. More than 200,000 revelers were expected on the Strip, which became a carnival of tuxedos and tutus, revelers and reverends, cardboard clown hats and carefully coiffed hair. There may have been only one-quarter the number of celebrants once predicted, but those who made it were taking their partying seriously.

“I’ve been waiting 25 years for this night,” said 25-year-old Jennifer Thompson, who came from central Florida, as she swigged from a half-empty bottle of white wine. “Forget New York. Vegas is where the real party is. The gambling. The action. The free alcohol. The drunkenness.”

Most hotels were running at only 60% occupancy. “It looks like we’re in for a millennium no busier than a typical summer weekend,” said Paul Spier, a spokesman for the Luxor and Excalibur hotels.

From San Francisco, where about 10,000 people had gathered near the Embarcadero, to Fresno, where the city’s downtown celebration attracted far fewer people than expected, to San Diego, where rain curtailed the city’s biggest party in Balboa Park, celebrations failed to match the scope of others around the globe.

After years of Y2K anxiety, it would have been hard to imagine that the biggest concern in Southern California would be a rainy afternoon and evening. Only at Disneyland and along the Colorado Boulevard Rose Parade route in Pasadena were there significant numbers of people gathered Friday night.

Los Angeles’ $1.1-million coordinated outdoor festivals in the Crenshaw District, San Pedro, Van Nuys and downtown attracted a total of just a few thousand people, far short of the hundreds of thousands once predicted.

Showers all but washed out the “One Wonderful Night” outdoor party in the Crenshaw district when heavy downpours delayed the event by four hours, thwarted electrical hookups, and winnowed the crowd to 300, only a few more than the 250 singers on stage.

At the city-sponsored party at the Van Nuys Airport the excitement level was akin to that of a chess match. On radio. “I would dance,” said Tiffany Gordon, 21, looking over crowd of 200, “if there was someone to dance with.”

Calls for police service were so scarce that Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks sent his day watch officers home on schedule. Riordan said millennial hype had been overblown all along. “It was built up into something much bigger than it was,” said the mayor. “That’s showbiz.”

In Pasadena, volunteers decorating Rose Parade floats struggled to protect them from the elements, but forecasters predicted clearing skies that should assure the parade will stay dry for the 45th consecutive year. Temperatures by the start of this afternoon’s Rose Bowl between Stanford and Wisconsin should approach 70 degrees.

The years of waiting for the prescribed “Big Moment” had dragged on for one long final day along the Pacific Coast, where television viewers watched as 19 other time zones rang in the New Year.

The tiny farming outpost of Pitt Island, New Zealand, became probably the first permanently settled community on Earth to greet the new dawn. Seventeen hours later in New York City, an estimated 1.5 million people crammed Times Square to watch the New Year creep around the globe.

Unprecedented security precautions greeted party-goers from coast to coast. In New York, 7,000 police officers managed the crowd in Times Square, where manhole covers had already been welded shut and all parking forbidden to prevent bombings. By nightfall, nearly all the storefronts that ring Union Square in San Francisco had been boarded over with plywood. Police in Tijuana had shut down Avenida Revolucion entirely for the Mexican city’s gala. Throughout California, massive police deployments were augmented with 1,700 National Guardsmen on call or standing by at armories around the state.

Art Benton, a Long Islander attending the Times Square celebration, spoke for partyers around the continent. “If [terrorists] are going to get you, they’ll get you,” Benton said. “But this has got to be one of the most protected places in the world, and you have to live your life, right? I’m not worried.”

Sales of Water, Flashlights

Many of those who stayed home also seemed to be preparing to hunker down, at least for the night. Bottled water and tiny, battery operated lights were being snapped up at the Walgreen’s pharmacy in San Francisco’s financial district. One customer rushed in Thursday night to buy 50 one-gallon bottles of water (cost: $60), then had the clerks load it into her taxi.

Many families said it was not fear that kept them at home, but a chance to celebrate a momentous occasion in a more meaningful way.

Marybell and Sergio Avila of Newport Beach considered high society shindigs and charity balls, but settled on cleaning out their garage, where they installed a television, pool table and hot dog machine. An air-filled, carnival-style slide went up in the backyard for the children. “It’s important to us to thank God that we can open our doors to our best friends and our family, that we’re all together at this moment,” said Marybell Avila.

The fizzle of Southern California’s celebrations may have satisfied critics who had been saying for months that the hype surrounding Jan. 1, 2000, was something of a canard. The celebration was tied, they noted, to a Christian calendar not even invented until A.D. 526--and widely suspected to have miscalculated the true birth date of Jesus. What’s more, they protested, an accurate countdown of the old century should begin a year from now and end on Jan. 1, 2001.

But the public, the press and entrepreneurs latched on to Jan. 1, 2000, with a vengeance. For most of 1999, the worlds of government and business obsessed over the Y2K computer anomaly. If computers failed to recognize the 2000 date, wouldn’t airline navigation systems fail, telephone connections go dead and bank transactions be stalled?

The $114 billion that Americans and their government spent to be sure that did not happen apparently worked.

In the final weeks of the last century, the attention of the nation’s political and law enforcement establishment turned to a much less predictable threat--terrorism.

Fears spiked in the last month as federal officials uncovered what they believe was a conspiracy by Algerian terrorists to smuggle explosives into the United States. Although authorities said they knew of no specific targets, one suspect was arrested as he apparently headed for a rendezvous in Seattle. The city’s millennium fete, scheduled to draw 50,000, was subsequently canceled.

Other incidents caused qualms, including the late December theft of explosives from a police bunker outside Fresno. But U.S. officials said they knew of no credible threats to domestic tranquillity.

Some, like congregants of the Endtime Harvest Church in the Central Valley city of Marysville, insisted a cataclysm was just around the corner.

Dark Visions of the Future

The multiracial flock mixed sermons, lofty hymns and 2,000 party poppers to welcome the new epoch, but Apostle Michael Sterling warned: “We believe we’re coming to some dark times. We’re in a season for the fulfillment of prophecies. I believe everyone in the world knows something is on the horizon.”

But others were predicting the millennial moment would be a peaceful one to be seized for expansive and hopeful discussion about the new epoch. A small group of scholars hoped the turn of the calendar would become a fulcrum for intellectual discourse, spiritual enlightenment, even utopian yearnings.

The Arlington, Va.-based Millennium Institute urged the public to seek ways to serve their communities and for leaders to talk about how to sustain life on the planet, with greater cooperation and planning. Hillel Schwartz, a senior fellow at the institute, has called Jan. 1, 2000 “a radiant moment . . . when people look in all directions for guiding lights and recastings of purpose.”

Several groups did not wait to get started on what they hoped will be a more altruistic, egalitarian age. Volunteers for Habitat for Humanity flew to New Zealand to build homes for the poor, hoping to claim the first good deed of the century. Nearly a full day later, activists massed in the Nevada desert for a candlelight procession on to the grounds of the test site where the U.S. has exploded more than 900 nuclear warheads, in what they believed was the first act of of civil disobedience of the new age.

“I think we overcome our desolation and discouragement by the simple act of walking together and facing an issue like this,” said the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, the Vietnam era activist who joined the procession at the Nevada Test Site.

Even the naysayers and the millennial humbugs have conceded that the year 2000 will inevitably become a watershed, a point around which historians can organize their thinking.

Looking back on what has been dubbed the “American Century,” the industrial dominance of the United States and the triumph of democracy in two world wars will certainly be high points. The passage of the Civil Rights Act, the creation of Social Security and ratification of the 19th Amendment--giving women the right to vote--also seem sure to rank as crowning achievements, just as the persistence of racism and poverty in a land of plenty will cloud the 1900s.

In Los Angeles, the year 2000 will mark the region’s ascendancy as a world center.

In the year 1000, Southern California was a largely unpopulated nirvana for small bands of Indians, who made an abundant living hunting and gathering. By 1900, the city of Angels was still a brash upstart of just over 100,000 people. Horses and trolleys dominated the city streets, where an influx of settlers from the East and Midwest had only begun to meld with the town’s Spanish founders.

It would have been absurd for anyone to predict at the turn of that century that this arid outpost one day would be proclaim itself the “Capital of the 21st Century.”

“I sometimes think about what it would be like for someone alive in 1899 to be with us right now,” said Bishop Frederick H. Borsch of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, “to see the technological marvels, the way we travel, how long we live, the ways we communicate. But we would also have to tell them about the wars and the genocide of this century and tell them that we have made some progress, but not nearly has much as we would want in treating each other justly.”

The public may view the millennium as a flickering moment that it will be all too happy to let slip into the past. But many students of the phenomenon say that millennialism will live well beyond today1/1.

Computer experts, for example, are already looking to Monday, Jan. 3, to see how thousands of small businesses and financial institutions that rely on computers adapt to the first full day of business in 2000. Computers may be challenged again in trying to negotiate the leap year, Feb. 29, a date that may not have been programmed into some software.

And many cults, extremist groups and apocalyptic religions have already sloughed off the significance of Jan. 1, 2000 in favor of other dates, analysts say.

One sect predicts a major cataclysm on May 5, 2000, a date it insists is somehow encrypted in the Great Pyramid and in astrology. Some fundamentalists have prophesied a second coming linked to another millennium, this of Jesus’ Resurrection, sometime in the 2030s, said Stephen O’Leary, co-founder of the Center for Millennial Studies and a professor at USC.

“The thing is, there are always at least some number of people keeping the apocalyptic feeling alive,” said O’Leary. “It may take a few years for the millennial flames to die down to an ember.”