On my 16th birthday I went down to the department of motor vehicles (this was when I lived in Detroit) and got my driver's license. On that day, an arbitrary one on the calendar, I became capable, in Michigan's eyes, of driving responsibly.

On my 18th birthday (I was living in Charlotte by this time) I went with some older friends to the local Pizza Hut and ordered a pitcher of beer. On that day, again a rather arbitrary one, I became capable in North Carolina's eyes of drinking responsibly.

I don't know that I was much different on either of those days than I was the day before, but somehow the passage of the calendar from one day to the next made me different in the eyes of the world.

This year, at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, you and I will pass over another arbitrary date that everyone seems to think is very important. Putting aside the question of just when a millennium really starts, or the questions of the three year error in accounting that would have put this transition a few Decembers back, it still remains an arbitrary date given a great deal of importance in the eyes of the world.

What is missing for me is not some sense of reasonableness about the choice of this day as the marker. We make arbitrary decisions about dates all the time. What I miss is any sense that passing over this threshold will leave us different people in the new year.

I'm not missing New Year's resolutions. Those are silly anyway. We can make resolutions about how to live any day. If I want to be a better person, why not start today, rather than next month?

I'm missing the sense that, by being the group of generations who make this transition together, we will emerge on the other side somehow changed. And I miss our commitment to live into that new identity. Not that I always drove responsibly after I was 16, or always drank in moderation once I became 18. Just that I knew there was a new vision of me as a person, and I tried to live up to that.

Without this sense of expectation (in the positive sense of waiting hopefully) and without a new vision of ourselves empowered by this transition to be more than we have been, the coming of the millennium will be pretty empty for me.

So, "Whatta ya say?" Why don't we imagine ourselves as somehow better for being the first people to set foot in the next thousand years. Let's imagine how that might be. How we'd like the world's opinion of us to change.

And then, let's begin to try to live up to that vision of ourselves.

Now, that would be a millennium party worth going to!