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I had to work on New Year’s Eve, 1999. I work with computers. Like many other people where I work, I was expected to be on-site in case of Y2K problems.

We had done extensive testing and preparation in advance, and nobody was very worried about any significant problems cropping up. So we had a sort of party, up in a conference room. We ate, and drank soft drinks, and flipped the channels on a small TV, watching the major networks’ coverage of the long-awaited dawning of the year 2000.

Someone expressed a wish for cable TV, so we could watch something other than this boring New Year’s Eve stuff. We told him it would be the same thing on all 200 cable channels.

“Oh? What about Cartoon Network?” he said.

“Even Cartoon Network. They’ll be running a Jetsons marathon — live!”

If you don’t believe we’re living in the amazing world of the future, consider this: today is Louise Brown’s 25th birthday.

Simon and Garfunkel may be touring again soon.

What a team! Together and separately, they’ve made a lot of wonderful music. They’re still making it.

Twenty years ago today, I saw Simon and Garfunkel in concert at the Akron Rubber Bowl. It was a long show, with three encores. Each of the singers had several solo turns, performing songs from their independent careers. As the evening drew on, almost every song was received with a sense of warm familiarity, and a growing astonishment at just how much those two fellas had up their sleeves.

Twenty years ago. It was a nostalgia show, even then. Akron was the first stop in the duo’s first U. S. concert tour since 1970. There was an energy and an innocence to some of the earlier songs that was exhilarating and embarrassing at the same time. Feeling groovy?

Someone threw love beads onto the stage. Art Garfunkel picked them up and said, “What is this, the Sixties?”

There was a tinge of sadness, too, for everything lost in the years since the previous tour. Paul Simon’s solo song, The Late Great Johnny Ace, was all about loss — particularly the death of John Lennon, still sharp in everyone’s memory twenty years ago.

There was a new verse for The Boxer, too:

Now the years are rolling by me,
They are rocking evenly.
I am older than I once was,
Younger than I’ll be,
That’s not unusual.
No, it isn’t strange,
After changes upon changes,
We are more or less the same.

After changes we are more or less the same.

Twenty years ago. Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not.

On July 2, 1776, representatives of 13 British colonies met in Philadelphia as the Second Continental Congress and declared their independence from England.

So why do Americans celebrate Independence Day on the 4^th of July?

On July 4, the Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. They knew that they were taking a large and dangerous step, splitting from the mother country. They felt that they should justify their actions.

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another… a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

In explaining themselves, they laid a foundation for a new kind of nation — based not on territory or ethnicity, but on an idea:

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed…

Nowadays in Washington, D.C., “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” appears to be a sign of weakness. Here’s what President Bush said in an interview in the Washington Post on November 18, 2002:

I’m the commander. See, I don’t need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.

Compare and contrast.