HEARE ARE PERSPECTIVES AT THE MOMENT OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Happy New Millennium, fellow Earthling. You and I are starting on a new voyage onto uncharted waters, facing the future as bravely and as calmly and as wisely as we can.

In preparation for this journey, some have viewed it optimistically, while others have seen it as a point in history when we have reached the end of the human tether and should be ready to accept the inevitable. The "inevitable" is a form of Armageddon, that is, the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of a phase that has terrible consequences for both the few winners and the many losers.

Such sentiments were widespread before A.D. 1000 and again in the early 19th century, which saw persistent predictions of the Second Coming of Christ throughout the period. The similarity between apocalyptic cults of the last century and some of today's fundamentalist doctrines is striking.

But at the bottom of every apocalyptic view there is a sense of fulfillment and of renewal. The fulfillment is religious in nature, but the renewal is undoubtedly taken from the example of nature. We see renewal after each of mankind's catastrophes such as forest fires and volcanic eruptions. New life crowds soon into the sterile residue, often more vigorous and more prolific than that which was destroyed.

The global catastrophe 65 million years ago that triggered the extinction of most species of the Cretaceous period, dinosaurs among them, made possible the rise of mammals and the eventual evolution of hominids. Evolution itself is a story of death and renewal, since selection of the successful is contingent on the demise of the less fortunate, and every mutation is an accident that is potentially lethal.

But all that is hindsight. It would be folly to invite catastrophe in anticipation better things may arise from the ashes, or to expose ourselves to radiation in the hope of causing favorable mutations. It is wise to accept disasters after the fact and make the best of whatever benefits they may bring with them. We must never invite disasters out of despair, for hope is our most valuable commodity and we must struggle for our existence with all the means civilization has at its disposal.

Our new challenge will be to structure society on a global scale so that law is projected downward through the hierarchy of institutions. At the same time -- and this is the greater challenge -- any such system that does not best serve humanity must be allowed to wither.

If a "veil of pessimism" still clouds humanity's future, there are at last hints that the veil may be lighting, that with greater awareness of the magnitude of global threats, has come new confidence in our ability to deal with them.

Concern for the world's environment has deepened and spread over wider areas of the political spectrum. The feeling is slowly growing, also, that wars have become as anachronistic as our ancient, genetically conditioned craving for fat.

The cold war between the world's superpowers may be over, as was announced by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1988, but it is not the end of hatred, prejudice and bloody conflicts. Although I am more optimistic now than I was two or three years ago, some of the old global problems seem to be in the process of replacing newer ones. Perhaps the nuclear standoff is less of an imminent threat today, but the profusions of weapons technology among the so-called third world nations is confronting us with a situation in which, sooner or later, everybody in the new millennium, perhaps even the next century, will be in a position to inflict intolerable damage on everybody else. This danger will come form an exploding number of strategic weapons, delivered by long-range missiles and tipped with chemical or biological if not nuclear warheads.

The superpowers, headed by the United States, may be able to forestall this danger for a while, but not for long. The military advantage high technology confers on its creators is but a temporary reprieve for all of mankind. The experience with the atom bomb should have taught us that knowledge of any kind cannot be bottled up for long in any one segment of our sociable species. Eventually it becomes the great equalizer.

The universal ability to do great harm to other nations will increase dramatically in the future and deterrence, while effective up to a point, breaks down when anger or misguided apocalyptic thinking or technological breakdown turns us suicidal. But it is not deterrence that keeps most of us from killing each other in the street but the lack of desire to kill coupled with a measure of confidence in the mechanisms society has devised to keep us all alive and well. These lessons have not yet been applied on a global scale, but soon enough we will acquire the wisdom to recognize no nation is a fortress unto itself and none of us regardless of where we are intellectually or geographically can escape this inevitable rule of survival.

This has been a wrenching century with the memorials to our madness more numerous and more poignant than the record of our many magnificent achievements. We managed to land men on the Moon but this achievement followed only a relatively few years the emancipation of millions of our fellow human beings. We found a way to prevent infantile paralysis but soon found the existence of even more terrifying and devastating diseases that now threaten entire families, even nations.

Our despair must wait. Let the apocalypse come when our sun dies a few billion years from now or when the universe ends in the big crunch many billions of years after that. For the moment let us resolve to keep alive and cultivate the spark of the human mind on this crowded but still beautiful planet that we have inherited for only a brief moment in its history.

Let us praise God and trust in His divine presence to guide us all into our collective new future. Happy New Millennium ... and may we grow older and wiser together!

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.