LET'S LOOK BACK BEFORE WE LEAP INTO THE FUTURE.

Byline: Richard Nemec

AS we approach the millennium, what do we do with the past, those yesterdays that shaped us, but now seem so obsolete? If the Dark Ages are now categorized as everything that happened before 1995, as some pundits characterize our past in today's dot-com world, what do we make of history - our own and the planet's?

I was confronted with these thoughts recently when my wife, innocently cleaning up some piles of paper around the house, came across cards, letters and photos from a happier time in our lives, back in the ancient transition year of 1995. My wife wiped away tears, and I looked away and went back to staring at the computer.

Later, long after she had left for work, I looked through the outwardly mundane items myself. Among the papers was a special post-Christmas note to two of her grandchildren - my son and daughter - from my then 84-year-old mother, who now faces the year 2000 with 88 summers under her belt. Thankyous and birthday greetings from two of my wife's oldest, dearest friends in Chicago, one now dead three years from complications caused by a lifetime of fighting the effects of lupus.

Then I came across the bright, beaming faces of my daughter, Kristen, about to turn 24, and her boyfriend, Tom Kochy, in an old photo. They had the millennium and the future written all over their easy, youthful smiles just a few short years ago. Reality has written a completely different story, a sudden tragedy. My daughter was killed at age 25, some 30 months ago. Tom unfortunately witnessed the hit-and-run killing on the streets of New York City.

So what about the past? Each of us has one, but we go there less and less. Oh, yes, the calendar turning to a new century has caused the media to reflect on highlights and historic events of this century, which I entered a few years before the halfway mark, but those remembrances seem to shrivel in the face of broad-band cables that propel our lives around the globe with the click of a mouse.

Besides a daughter cut down too soon, my family has lost a number of important people and things in little more than a decade. We are still reeling from being knocked around repeatedly by this life that all of us take too much for granted. We look ahead mostly to ease the past's pain, but not to forget.

When my wife and I were going through college, launching careers and starting a family, we - knowingly or not - bought into the prevailing bromide of the late 1960s and early '70s that said we weren't suppose to forget ``who we were and where we came from.'' An early 20th century thought was that ``the past is prologue'' and those who ignore history are ``doomed to repeat it.''

I do not see or feel any widespread adherence to this view as we close one century and launch into a fresh one. No one seems to remember anything before Windows 95 or after the price of Yahoo! stock. Is there nothing to be learned from the first 95 years of the 20th century, or even the time before people knew what Y2K meant?

My personal history and mind-set tell me that there are lessons we still haven't discovered, may never uncover, and that life will not always deliver the extraordinary, as the electronic superhighway has led us to believe. We still have too many people in this time of unparalleled socio-economic advantages and opportunities killing people in bizarre, unexplainable ways. We cannot ignore our stark history of violence.

Like most individuals, the world's past is never particularly pretty or uncomplicated if we really look hard enough. The temptation is to not look, or to do so selectively. Hence, some people looking at the past five years of growing Internet dependence will not see the homeless, or too many children being medicated to curb their natural behavior or illegal drug abuse at epidemic levels. They will see only ever-successful IPOs for high-tech companies that feed off one another.

The past will remind us that we have had whole generations feeling alienated, major communities and regions fending off environmental assaults, and pre-DNA days when our public conscience kept a wary eye on cloning and other modern scientific attempts to alter man's natural order. We look for answers on Internet web sites where chat rooms and bulletin boards, streaming video/audio sessions, expect us to create ever-more choices for the human race.

The consequences of this ever-wider array of choices is rarely discussed. Are all of these choices necessary and good for us? For some of us, this question in itself is a call to recapture the past.

I was provoked into looking back recently by a wise and spiritual American Indian during a visit to the mystical red rock vistas of Sedona, Ariz. He reminded me that Native Americans for many hundreds of years lived in the United States with a great respect for the past, their elders and Mother Earth. They lived in harmony with their surroundings prior to the coming of the Europeans and others.

It made me think about what harmony we have in today's world as we approach another 1,000-year milestone. For all of our trappings and toys, we could use a little harmony - within ourselves and within the world we have created in our electronic tubes.