SOS! — OUR DESTRUCTION BY CONSPIRACY THEORIES!!

SOS! My family and I were facing imminent death and enslavement by evil forces, a doom that was going to take place starting at MIDNIGHT, how apt and spooky is that? It’s tricky trying to escape from reaching MIDNIGHT, you are absolutely trapped unless you can knock together a time machine in short order. WE were doomed, doomed, I tell you DOOMED!!

That our impending doom was to be ushered in by a Y2K bug at midnight was proposed by many individuals and groups, quoting from wiki,

A variety of fringe groups and individuals such as those within some fundamentalist religious organizations, survivalists, cults, anti-social movements, self-sufficiency enthusiasts, communes and those attracted to conspiracy theories, embraced Y2K as a tool to engender fear and provide a form of evidence for their respective theories. End-of-the-world scenarios and apocalyptic themes were common in their communication.

Any of that sound familiar?

Dire warnings at times were even published by governments:

The Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Niño and there will be nasty surprises around the globe. — John Hamre, United States Deputy Secretary of Defense[13]

Just how seriously did my family take all this stuff? Were we shivering in fear watching with wide eyes as the clock ticked towards midnight and the end of civilisation as we had known it? Instead, we climbed Mt Coolum so that from the top we could view fireworks up and down the coast to usher in the year 2000. I cannot remember any of us even mentioning our supposed slavery to come as the clock ticked towards that fateful end-of-life-as-we-knew-it midnight. We were enjoying ourselves too much, and too challenged by climbing a mountain using torches, to give that nonsense any thought at all.

If you want to know more about the panic and fear that the Y2K bug generated across the globe, please take the time to read it up — and see whether you can see similarities to today.

Two of our Christian friends, teachers and intelligent pleasant people, who should have known better, bought into all this silly stuff lock stock and barrel. They bought survivalist plots of land on which to grow survivalist food and purchased some goats…