My anti- futurist friends were disappointed when the world failed to end at midnight. They didn’t really want it to be destroyed, only brought to a standstill and given a chance to repent. They had hoped the world’s great electronic brain would have a seizure, confounded by the zeroes of the millennial end or beginning, and the big money machine would break down, TV would go blank, cars would stall, shopping malls would be boarded up, and microwave ovens would shut off, leaving dinners frozen.
On New Year’s Eve, we sat in a mountain cabin in the Catskills, warmed by an iron woodburning stove in the golden glow of kerosene. Off the Grid. We intended to stay off until daylight. but at midnight we gave in and turned on the portable radio and desperately spun the tuning knob scanning the atmosphere for cries of panic and disaster. But the radio only had old music and the usual preachers with incomprehensible sermons.
We went out into the dark and looked up and saw that life in the Milky Way had not changed and that our world moves on through star spattered infinitude.