If it is only for y2k, I would suggest that isn't enough. Unless you are a bumpmonth/year person.

Whaddya gonna do when your y2k prep runs out and you haven't prep'd for the post y2k world? The wrong response is to squirrel even more stuff away, "so you'll never run out". The right response is, having prep'd y2k to the extent of your vision of disruption probabilities, to use the remaining time to create a relatively in balance, sustainable, relatively self-reliant, increased neighborhood socialization, simple, lifestyle. Bake your own bread, know your meat while it still has fur, hair, scales, and feathers and do the deed yourself. Do your own garden. Worship something other than money. Wean yourself from "fast". None of these "right" responses are left field or out of place.

imho, the very last thing I am preparing for is a re-start, post y2k, of the very way I've been living. This is a chance to live in a different way, balanced, and comfortable in a way that is different than the status quo of North America.

-- Mitchell Barnes (spanda@inreach.com), January 16, 1999

Answers

It seems a lot of people want to prepare for Y2K in terms of surviving until utility services can be restarted. No one can say how long this will be. I'd rather work toward surviving until "I", both as individual and part of communities, can re-learn to live sustainably off the land.

Dan Robinson 541-465-4790 350 Pearl St. #1105 danrob@efn.org Eugene OR 97401 www.efn.org/~danrob/

Be here now; observe the past; create the future. Only these are needed; only these are possible.

-- Dan Robinson (danrob@efn.org), January 19, 1999.

I agree that it is a terrible mistake to just prepare for a return to life as we have known it on a business-as-usual basis. But then Ive always been a critic of business-as-usual. Y2K is not a technical problem. It is a social problem. It stems from the fact that as a species we have worked very hard to develop our technological sciences and skills and have done very little to develop our ethics and the social structures that derive from our ethics. If Y2K turns out to be a trivial glitch in business-as-usual we will all suffer for it. Business as usual is rapidly moving us toward extinction.

I propose that we look for post-y2k opportunities to make truth, love, and creativity our bottom line instead of profits. To that end I call the attention of all interested parties to a document called the Bill of Ethics and its explanatory article The Bloodless Revolution, both of which are posted at http://www.gaiafriends.com/ethics.

The key to understanding our current dilemma is to recognize the pernicious effects of bureaucracy. Contrary to popular belief, the word, "bureaucracy" is not synonymous with "organization". Bureaucracy is properly defined as "the systematic elimination of corrective feedback". The worst form of bureaucracy is the insistence of many institutions that ethical ends can be reached by unethical means. This false premise is the cause of much of the worlds evil; yet it is the most common error that our institutions make.

So indeed, lets prepare to create a world that values people above money, truth above happiness, creativity above power, and love above popularity. If we do we will all be richer, happier, and more empowered than most of us could ever imagine.

-- Bob Podolsky (podolsky@clipper.net), February 03, 1999.