t Millennium?
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES The year 2000 dawned with fears of a Y2K meltdown and expectations that we’d spend the next 12 months counting down to the real century- and thousand-year turn, which is now. But millennium fever died about as quickly as the over-hyped Y2K phenomenon.
Instead, we spent much of the year obsessing over the wild dot-com roller coaster. And now the biggest fear is over whether the economic slowdown that we’ve entered is headed toward a “soft landing” or a recession.
Maybe that’s a lesson. Things move so fast in this new cyber age, with circumstances changing by the hour or the minute, who has time to pause and reflect on anything? It’s hard enough to keep up with the e-mail and the digital organizer, who has time to look back on a month or a year, much less a century or a millennium?
Perhaps historians a few thousand years from now will note that we earthlings only made a big deal over one millennium, this 2000 one. We were too primitive to do so in the year 1000, and too advanced to ever do so again.
air Air Fare
What better way to usher in 2001 than with an old controversy that is sure to continue dominating much of the local discourse? I refer, of course, to El Toro.
In the adjacent column we are running three anti-airport letters. I call particular attention to the first letter, from Len Kranser, which I regard as an unintended holiday gift to pro-airport yours truly.
Len does an excellent job of presenting the anti-airport view on his Web site, www.eltoroairport.org. But in this letter, he provides fodder to those of us who maintain that Orange County needs more commercial air capacity. Len, you see, recently found that it cost $429 more to fly his family to Phoenix from John Wayne than from Long Beach. Kranser isn’t the only El Toro airport foe who I have heard at one time or another mutter about the high prices at John Wayne, but he’s the first I know of who has stated it so publicly.
Now, Kranser is not suggesting that we should put a commercial airport at El Toro, but that we should cram more flights into John Wayne. Putting aside the fact that “maxing out” pint-sized JWA is hardly a long-term solution to the county’s air travel needs, his argument raises another issue. Is it good public policy to place additional burdens on a hemmed-in airport, while ignoring the runways that are sitting at a remote, sprawling former Marine base just a few miles away?
Still, it’s refreshing to hear an anti-airport partisan griping about the cost and availability of flights in Orange County.
Thanks, Len, and Happy New Year.
