Cashing in on a new era
The millennium is coming and three years in advance of this artificial moment, every conman, religious freak, fool and impressionable idiot is working himself into a frenzy.
The first gleam of sunshine on January 1, 2000, over some watery flea-speck in mid-Pacific will herald - nothing. What does the millennium really mean? Nothing. How will it change the life of the majority of people on the planet? It won't. What's all the fuss about? Money, of course.
Glorious wonderful cash profits, millions and billions of dollars over the next few years will be shelled out by the gullible in honour of the illogical to be reaped by the avariciously cynical. If so many poor fools were not about to be swindled out of good money by a horde of highly-skilled marketers, the entire show would be hugely entertaining. Mementoes, wall plaques, television shows, land rights to the prime viewing posts, coffee mugs, religious mania . . . the millennium has lured into the open every demented fanatic who expects the 'second coming' and equally zealous promoters who see the start of the third millennium as a God-given opportunity to make vast profits.
What is the basis of this sad mixture of religious belief and greed? It is the birth of a child to an obscure carpenter in a cowshed in the Middle East. Nobody knows the date. The most respected theologians admit they do not have a clue what year it was. Best guess it was winter but it could have been six years before or after the accepted date. Millennium celebrations, therefore, are based on the most flimsy of evidence.
Down the middle of the Pacific there is the international date line. This invisible and arbitrary divide was slashed mathematically down the ocean 18 centuries after the birth of Christ. The 180th meridien was chosen because it was on the far side of the planet from London (where time was measured at Greenwich) and because nobody lived there. It goes through uninhabited waters and where there is any land with sizeable population, it takes a bend to avoid them.
About the closest the dateline comes to people is the isolated and justifiably unknown Chatham Islands. This remote and highly-forgettable outpost of New Zealand has two reasons for notoriety; sheep outnumber people by about 75 to one and it was the former site of a concentration camp where the British dumped Maoris who objected to their land being invaded and stolen.
Now international events promoters are stomping keenly around the windswept fields, scaring the sheep and seeking to lay claim to the spot they claim will give mankind first sight of that epochal sunrise.