Everybody is wrong! The year 2000 is not the beginning of the 21st century. It is the beginning of the last year of the 20th century. When the year ends, then and only then will the 21st century begin. Prove
Everybody is wrong! The year 2000 is not the beginning of the 21st century. It
is the beginning of the last year of the 20th century. When the year ends, then
and only then will the 21st century begin.
Prove it to yourself. The first
year of the first century was the year 1, right? Then, at the end of the 99th
year of that century , only 99 years had passed, right? But every century must
have 100 years, right? So the year 100 would have had to be over and done with
in order to complete the first century, right? So then, the 2nd century could
only have begun when the year 100 had ended, and 101 had begun.
Right? Now
move forward to our time. When 1999 became 2000, the first two digits of our
yearly date changed, true. But that only means that the year has changed, not
the century. Not until the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, 2000, when the old
man with the scythe says “Aloha,” and the new baby cries out amid the sound of
fireworks — assuming they’re still legal — can we honestly say that we are in
the 21st century.
My apologies for busting your bubble. Some people got
married at midnight, but they were a year early. And all the babies born that
night were, in a manner of speaking, born before their time.
But your
oversight was only human, after all. Not so the highly-trained media people,
CNN and the like, who persistently refer to the present time as “the new
millennium.”‘ For them, there is no excuse. Auwe!
Ernest
Perry
Kapa’a