Bay Weekly
Celebrating Chesapeake’s Past;
Imagining Our Future
It may be the dark, cold days of winter. But in many ways, these days are fresh as springtime on the Chesapeake.
The new millennium has arrived, not to mention the 21st century. The General Assembly is back with a bulging surplus that should mean better services, tax relief or both. The Redskins are a rejuvenated football team, giving us playoff pleasure. And last but hopefully not least, we’re back with an easier-to-say name, Bay Weekly, which conveys exactly who we are and what we’re about.
No, we’re not changing. We haven’t been gobbled up by one of the corporate newspaper chains that turned Maryland stuffed ham into Spam. We’re the same family with the same philosophy of bringing you news and views with the aim of achieving high-quality living along the Bay.
In that vein, last spring we started warning you about the millennium hucksters who wanted to get in your pockets and about the doomsayers who would be scaring your bloomers off. Needless to say now, none of that happened. You can probably pick up a generator pretty cheap these days.
(Our favorite Y2K story is about the guy at a party who sneaked down in the basement at midnight and turned off the power, generating shrieks of “It happened, it happened.” That’s about what all the predictions amounted to.)
Truth be told, we’re a little ashamed of our brothers and sisters in the media who trumpeted all the scare stories without, in most cases, trying to measure the true threats. In this new year, we’ve finally seen some insightful reports about the hucksters who made a killing and the costs of making changes that may not have been necessary. We noticed, too, the head of the International Y2K Cooperation Center acknowledging that amidst all the hubbub, he never encountered a single threat worldwide that could have spelled catastrophe.
That bit of self-congratulation behind us, you might be thinking that we’re going to bid adieu to the millennium. Nope, just the opposite. We will be using this milestone in history to look at Bayside lives and dreams. This week, we feature Marylanders from 109 to 19 looking backward, at how the technology of the last century has changed their lives, and forward.
Instead of worrying about which century the year 2000 belongs in, at Bay Weekly we’re celebrating it as the meeting of millennia. All year long, we’ll be taking as our inspiration words we wrote last summer:
“The time has arrived to look ahead not with angst but with joy about being on earth at such a calendar passage. Just as this is a special moment in history, it can be a special moment in our lives, a time of personal renewal, public commitment or both.”
To keep that promise fresh, we’re repeating it on our contents page every week this year. You’ll find it “In This Issue” in the banner that reads Bay Weekly Millennial Coverage: Celebrating Chesapeake Past • Imagining Our Future.
Copyright 2000
New Bay Times Weekly
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