Fixing the Y2K Problem
As some of you may know, there is controversy over the fact that since the first year of the A.D. era was A.D. 1, the new millennium should not start until A.D. 2001. I will now address the issue in a funnier, more humorous way. Please take me seriously.
First of all, it is a fact that we will start the new century on January 1, A.D. 2000. We started the twentieth century on January 1, A.D. 1900. We started the nineteenth on January 1, A.D. 1800. . . . We started the second on January 1, A.D. 100. We started the first on AD. 1, and we ended the previous on December 31st 1 B.C. Wait a minute here! The last century B.C. and the first century A.D. were only 99 years? We are missing two years here!
I propose we resolve this in one of four ways. The first is to sweep these facts under the rug. Let the millennium be celebrated like it always has with the turn of a new century every ten centuries. It does not seem to matter for our centuries, does it? (Hence the twentieth century is 1900-1999 not 1901-2000). The way it is now, according to some scientists, the twenty-first century will have one year stuck in second millennium. Already this is bad considering that the twenty-first century does not start with the numbers 21 but 20, and the third millennium begins with the number 2 and not 3. It may just be easier to sweep this fact under the rug and forget that single year. Who needs an extra year?
My second way of resolving this is to give us a zero year in which Jesus was born. (According to an article that I read in the Omaha World Herald by Richard N. Ostling (AP), it is highly disputed that Christ may have been born as early as 6 B.C. Right now we have Christ being born on December 25, 1 B.C. and then seven days later is the new year being A.D. 1 (Though Christ was not really born on December 25.)) In my idea, Jesus would be born in 0 B.C., and seven days later celebrate the new year of A.D. O. By doing this it would move all the years back, making the current year 1998. The only down side is that we would have to listen to the Monica Lewinsky stuff again. Okay, get real, actual time will not reverse, but just the measurement, like daylight savings time. The upside is that there will be one more year to fix the Y2K problem with computers.
Better yet, why don't we perfect the calendar and move it back to start in 6 B.C., that way the millennium will have already passed and we will be in A.D. 2005. Down side: We would have skipped the next two presidential election years and President Clinton will still be in office violating the Constitution. (I'm referring to the term limit.) Upside: Y2K craze will be over.
Moving the years might be a problem because of the enormous expense in changing the textbooks. Do you remember the sixth Great Lake law passed by Congress last year? If that piece of info slipped by you, last spring Congress made Lake Chamberlain a Great Lake. Downside: Inaccurate textbooks. Upside: More New England states were eligible for college grants given to the Great Lake States. (The law was latter retracted quote: "We just were not thinking about the textbooks and stuff that needed to be changed." However, after retracting this law, they added 3,000 more pages to the tax law to compensate us on the time spent on the sixth Great Lake Law.)
Possibly the best way to fix this problem is to get in a time machine, record Christ's birth, and give it to Dionysus Exiguous who split time so it would go in two opposite directions at the B.C./A.D. change over. (1,000,000-1B.C. 1-1999 AD.) This way the textbooks would not have been written yet and they will be correct for our children and us. Since I am still writing this, I guess no one took my last idea seriously. I reason from the fact that if someone did give Dionysus the date of Christ's birth, this topic would not have come up. Instead, in what would be the present year of 2005, I would be writing about how by now everyone's New Year's resolutions would have been broken by now.
Why don't we just keep that missing year under the rug like we have for almost 2000 years? Why change now?