By Michelene Ough
The news is in: Thanks to a clever bit of millennial law-bending, local bars can now be expected to keep their doors open till the crack of dawn, Jan. 1, 2000.
The idea is that potentially chaos-causing street-wanderers will have something to keep them occupied — besides fist fights about whether the third sign of Apocalypse was the sea turning red or the sun turning black.
And really, what better way to keep people from harming themselves and others in outdoor frenzies of millennial anxiety than to herd them off the streets and into their favourite watering holes?
But wait! Have we forgotten that drinking among large groups of strangers until all hours of the night is bound to cause frenzies of activity? Weren’t closing laws created to prevent exactly that?
And now these rules are being changed . . . to accommodate what is sure to be the most gluttonous of all collective drinking binges until 2999.
A simpler solution would be this: everybody stay home.
As everyone should know by now, many people attach a bizarre — if understandably human — significance to the arbitrarily assigned “Year 2000.”
According to historians, millennial fever has caused countless acts of mania and violence through the ages.
Toward the year 1100, a movement called the People’s Crusade sprang up. Mark Kingwell, in his book Dreams of Millennium, tells how the masses followed “the charismatic lead of Peter the Hermit, a crazed former monk who argued that . . . the millennium was about to dawn.”
During their “militant pilgrimage” to the Holy Land, most of Peter’s devotees died, but “not before managing to sack villages, rape young women, and kill as many Jews as they could lay their hands on.”
“ ‘As usual,’ ” wrote historian Norman Cohn of the Crusade, “ ‘the route to the Millennium led through massacre and terror.’ ”
Consider: Impending mania, violence, depression, and a continuous public flow of alcohol. An alarming combination, to say the least.
On Dec. 31, anyone venturing into the night will become party to a millennial- and alcohol-induced insanity, the scope of which we cannot possibly predict.
Do yourself a favour: Pour a few glasses of wine for your nearest and dearest, watch a movie and pray to the ghosts of millennia past, present and future that you fall asleep before drunken strains of Auld Lang Syne start drifting in from the street, drowned out by the wail of police sirens.
Happy New Year.