I ran into my neighbor this morning at the supermarket. She works in "logistics" for a large retail chain. I asked how they were doing with the Year 2000 (Y2K) challenge.

"We're afraid," she said.

"It isn't us, it's our suppliers, manufacturers, the whole big chain. We receive 20% of our merchandise from outside America, mostly by ship. If we put every single ship in dry dock today to make them Y2K compliant, there wouldn't be room in the world to hold them all.

"Some manufacturers tell us they're just starting to do assessments. Which means, of course, it's already too late."

We looked at the frozen food, the lights, the cash registers, the shoppers going about their business. "People just blow it off when you tell them what could happen. Everybody's in denial."

Well … not everybody.

The futures market, making big bets on either side of the millenium, is not in denial. The wolves of Wall Street are betting on catastrophe.

The scene outside the supermarket is tranquil. Ornamental trees are blossoming, lilacs blooming, and the sun on this crisp spring day is radiant. The local multiplex movie theater is showing another disaster movie, this one about a comet hitting the earth. I remember "On the Beach," the last days of remnant nuclear-boomed humanity, the end signified by newspapers blowing through empty streets. In "Y2K - The Movie," the final image is a dead computer, not newspapers no one is left to read, and the streets will be full, not empty.

In "Y2K - The Reality," humanity is again being called to measure and declare itself. The real issue is, are we up to the challenge? Are we up to fighting this war?

Every one of us is a philosopher. We all make decisions about what matters most. Usually it's not words but our lives that testify to our deepest beliefs and the commitments that elicit our passion.

For atheistic existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre, who believed that extreme conditions illuminate the truth of our souls, the battle cry is "No excuses!" For explicitly religious people, the mandate is to take responsibility for living rightly. The results in both cases are the same: men and women who refuse to be seduced by trivial distractions or lesser goods and who live from the depths of their quest for meaning.

The week that Princess Diana and Mother Theresa died, we also lost Victor Frankl. Frankl's belief that the search for meaning is our ultimate motivation was discovered in a concentration camp. The Nazis took Frankl's livelihood and made him a prisoner. They took his clothing and replaced it with oversized striped pajamas. They took his name and replaced it with a number. They took his family and replaced them with nothing. They took the predictability of daily life and replaced it with a constant threat of starvation and torture. They took every single thing that we use to make life "human" yet he clung to the belief that life even in hell had meaning. He embodied the truth that especially when the chips are down and our backs to the wall, we are capable of responding to whatever life brings with resilience, dignity, and in our best moments, genuine heroism.

Life in the United States has been for many a long sunny ride on a tame horse. The "haves" seem lost in euphoric fog, oblivious to our radical contingency. After a run of good luck, people think they deserve it. That can make real threats to our well being seem like special effects, digital manipulation that we watch on a distant screen, warm and dry as Manhattan floats away when a tidal wave hits.

In Hilo Hawaii there is a large green park on the oceanfront. There used to be buildings there. When the warning came of a tidal wave, people gathered to watch it slam into the town. Then the water receded, thousands of fish flopping in the mud flats as the ocean disappeared. Hundreds of people rushed onto the reef to gather fish. Then the second wall of water came, moving at hundreds of miles an hour, fifty feet high. A third wave cleaned up whatever was left.

The current warnings of Y2K are the first wave. We go to the movies, shop, live our lives, happily gathering fish flopping in the shallows.

This is a war. Wars require organization, rationing of scarce resources, hard choices made in light of the Big Picture. This crisis will reveal who we really are. Some will engage in quiet heroics and no one will ever know. Some will discover how shallow and venal they really are. The American Civil War brought us both Abraham Lincoln and those he called "the wolves of Wall Street," who bet against their own country to leverage their advantage.

How do we access those depths from which human beings respond with their best efforts? Religious people use symbols and beliefs to access in a primary way the capacity for self-transcendence. Having faith - using those symbols sincerely - is like solving a puzzle in a computer game, taking ourselves to the next level. Belief moves people to move mountains if not the mountains themselves. Yet those who have no explicit religious beliefs also have innately within themselves, intrinsic to their humanity, that same capacity to respond in ways that dignify our species. That capacity is accessed when we choose to access that capacity.

No excuses.

To know what CAN happen means we can make choices now about critical systems and plan for the long haul. In the long haul, humanity does quite well. We're learn from this experience - although slowly, slowly - and maybe we'll pay attention a little more closely in the future. The future is not fixed. The future is a spectrum of possibilities fanned out before us. It may be too late to reprogram everything, but we can still choose the wiser options if only we have the will to do so before the next wave hits.

May 9 1998