Now, of course, the millennium has come and gone. The common fear as it approached had more to do with computers running amok, water purification plants being contaminated when their machinery went offline, weeks without access to cash when the banks' computers that had not been 'remediated' seized up and more horror stories. (At the time, we lived about a mile from a huge reservoir, but a neighbor actually asked me what we would do if no water came out of the tap on January 1, 2000. I suggested a walk of about two miles round trip--that's if the car wouldn't start or the gas pumps wouldn't deliver fuel--with bucket in hand.).

             Despite the intrusion of the Mayan calendar, the millennium was a Christian calendar event (although Mayan true believers would contend that the differences-what with the old pre-Vatican-interference Julian calendar in which Christ was born in the spring, and the 'new' Gregorian calendar-are no more than the natural imprecision in calculations of that magnitude.) Plus, of course, there have been subtle changes in the axis of the Earth and so on. Stearns contended that the Mayan intrusion did perhaps have some effect, if only to add to the excitement and cause modern people to look more closely at their lives. If an ancient people could go around making calendars that basically worked to the present day, and, moreover, predicted what would happen, perhaps that means it is time to take a good look at what we are doing and how we are doing it, and to stop congratulating ourselves on how clever we, of all history, claim to be.

             Actually, Arguelles predicted that the intergalactic saviors would 'present' as inner lights (fairly hard to detect, unless you are the one they're in), or as "feathered serpent rainbow wheels turning in the air" (Stearns 1998 112). Arguelles was probably safe from being called on that prediction; not too many people who value their liberty would go around claiming to see serpents cavorting in the etheric, with or without feathers.