What's the big deal about 1,000 years?

WAS ALL the shouting about in January? And do we have to crank up all that millennium hype again at the end of this year? For party buffs, having the party of the century twice would be a blast. But for those sticklers for detail, they're probably as put out by January's celebrations as would be those charged with cleaning up the mess.

But what's the point? Why make such a big deal about what officially designates the end of a thousand years? And why have so many invested so much in worrying about "end times," the end of the world as we know it, at the end of 2000 years of Christian history?

For both answers, I offer a simple explanation: Look in the mirror.

Show a mirror to an animal and the creature will probably give it a quizzical look.

Show a mirror to a man or woman and, almost automatically, chances are they will primp.

Whether animals discuss their condition and their hopes for the future is unknown. But we certainly know that human beings, the most self-conscious of species, view the world around them in terms of themselves.

So it's no surprise that, based on an arbitrary date made up in the most arbitrary of ways, we pause to examine our past, our future, and our relation to those subjects.

And it's no wonder that the millennium's end, that artificial hinge of time, engenders so much introspection.

But when we start staking our fortunes on our world's ending by a particular date or quibbling over whether a certain date reflects the end of 1,000 years, that's arrogance.

And that mirrors our preoccupation with ourselves.

After all, despite our impressive claims of doom, or our relatively petty bickering about what constitutes a millennium, the world will just shrug and continue to turn.

Sure, it'll wear down in time, but to calculate the day and time is only a reflection of our own fears and pride.

It's possible to separate millennium fever into two parts -- millennialism and a simple search for the right date.

The first is best -- or worst -- epitomized by those poor folks in California several years ago who, when the Hale-Bopp comet blazed overhead, saw that as a precursor of their millennium.

They destroyed themselves, expecting that their ectoplasmic remains would hitch a ride on a star vehicle preceding the comet and ride to glory. If they've reached their goal, we'll not know any time soon. But what they saw reflected in Hale-Bopp was such a powerful image that it killed them.

Such millennialism is nothing new. A particularly American strain had its roots in 1843, when the Great Comet flashed over our continent. William Miller, an itinerant preacher with an eloquent tongue, persuaded thousands that the celestial visitation heralded the end.

His followers divested themselves of their possessions, cloaked themselves in white, and repaired to hilltops to await the end. One poor man brought along a cow, accoutered in the appropriate white vestments, because "the kids will need milk."

When the end didn't come, many trudged down from the hillsides and attempted to buy back their farms and property from their more jaded neighbors, often without success.

Miller admitted that, sheesh, maybe he was off by a digit or two, and persuaded enough followers to band together that their spiritual descendants, the Seventh Day Adventists, are still waiting for the end.

A more extreme group of Millerites transmogrified into Branch Davidians, many of whom met a gruesome fate in the fires that destroyed their compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993.

In those two examples we see people driven to more than distraction by their incapacity to deal with the world as they saw it. Their world was coming to an end. For them, a fire in the sky wasn't a pretty sight. It was their deliverance.

A safer, yet not necessarily saner aspect of millennialism stems from our efforts to impose ourselves upon time -- to make it jump when we say so.

There are, of course, practical reasons for measuring time. Consider how American railroads, stuck with a mishmash of time zones as they pushed their rails across the country, finally said "wait a minute," and led the movement for standard time zones. For a traveler making her way across the country, such a regimentation of the sun and the moon was a godsend.

Sure, we can structure our calendar to serve as a handy interface between us and celestial movements, but such systems are as perfect as we are. Pope Gregory, with papal infallibility, devised a numbering system that leaves us scrambling to account for intermittent irregular revolutions of the earth and stars. Our systems are as reliable as our clocks, and there are no infallible timepieces.

That makes the bickering over when the millennium -- if we base it on these calendars of our own invention -- pretty foolish.

One way of settling that question was offered about a hundred years ago, using the currency of our most logical of inventions -- money. Dr. Albert Shaw, in the defunct Review of Reviews, wrote:

"[ldot] The mathematical faculty works more keenly in monetary affairs than elsewhere; and none of the people who have proposed to allow ninety-nine years to go for a century would suppose that a $1,900 debt [has] been fully met by a tender of $1,899."

NCEW member James M. Abraham is an editorial writer with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, covering the Port Charlotte region.