We're eight years into the 21st century. I was going to wait until advanced old age to compare this century with the 20th century, thus annoying the bejeebers out of my poor grandkids, but I have some free time this afternoon, and I'm not the most patient woman in the world. In this new millennium we have made several great advances--several laudable improvements in the human condition--but darned if I could think of one. Let's start off with the big changes; the really salient and vexing issues.

In the New Millennium, we have fewer crackers in a box. Last century, to save on packaging, there were boxes full of crackers. I'm old enough to remember these. I swear to God: you opened the box and reached about half an inch down and took hold of a cracker. Now, to save on crackers, and to fool consumers and fill landfills quicker, a box a foot tall might contain 15 crackers. Soon it will contain 6 1/2 crackers, and we will be expected to believe that this is due to "product settling during shipment." Price: $4.99 plus tax.

While we're discussing packaging, can we talk toys for a minute? In my childhood, toys were just as accessible as crackers.  You simply A. opened box and B. lifted out new plaything. Now pliers, wire cutters, and small explosives are required to extract a Barbie doll from her box. She is wired to a plate. She is screwed to thick cardboard with both metal and plastic. She is tied on. She is clamped down. She has a plastic collar around her neck and cuffs around her feet. Somebody at Mattel is really sick. I spent from midnight to 12:30 a.m. removing a Furby from its box on the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was cursing except for Mom. Saddam Hussein was extradited for trial with fewer restraints than that stupid Furby. I finally removed the final Furby shackle and turned it on. It said, "I don't like you. You scary." The feeling is mutual, furball. Somebody in China was terrified that you would escape that box and attack innocent Wal-Mart shoppers.

Furbies are obviously as dangerous as that other dread millennial hazard, hair gel. My hair gel was confiscated in an airport because it might be harboring a bomb, and improbable terrorists (such as yours truly) are plenty clever enough to wire that Vital Essence Humectant Passionflower and Pomegranate Moisture Gelee ("now with Vitamin K!") to blow the plane to kingdom come. I wanted to say, "you people are so smart, what about my HAIR DRYER? Huh? Huh? Unlike hair gel it already has wires in it, and sometimes it ticks!" But I didn't want to get arrested, or worse, have to buy another hair dryer. The post 9/11 world has been a tough adjustment for me. I cry at old movies when the heroine, her hair tied up in a scarf, kisses Fred MacMurray at the bottom of the ladder and then climbs right up into the plane. Forget how debonair Fred is, or whether the two lovers shall ever meet again. It chokes me up every time--"she's going right onto the airplane, look, children, she just got there thirty seconds ago and she's boarding with a huge suitcase and a purse and two carry-ons! Uninspected! No delays! Somebody get me a Kleenex!"

In my grandpappy's day, people went to jail because they were in debt. Dark, desolate times were these. In this progressive age, you can go bankrupt eight or nine wonderful times, and you will never go to jail unless you owe the government. Besides, in decades past, people keeled over and croaked of they knew not what. In 1900, there were only four causes of death other than old age: the wasting feverish consumption, the plain pox, the sexually transmitted pox, and gouty feet. Doctors treated all of the above with leeches. Now we have hundreds of very effective drugs. No one need suffer unless, as explained above, they owe the IRS. It is altogether possible for one's bloodstream to be laced with some drug or another one's entire life, beginnning in the womb when one gets Mommy's tranquilizers, throughout toddlerhood where one gets bovine antibiotics in one's milk, right on into day care when the harried worker suggests Ritalin to equally harried parents, which opinion is later maintained by overworked schoolteachers until one comes down with one's very first depressive episode. Ain't this millennium grand?

African Americans, Native Americans and women were officially oppressed during the last century. Now minority groups are officially equal, and rich white men expect them to shut up about their so-called grievances. The ruling class now builds very nice monuments outside of Native American reservations so that indigenous peoples can drive out and look at the spot where their ancestors were butchered so that they could be forced onto reservations. That is what I call progress. That same overwhelmingly rich-white-male ruling class also responds, in these more enlightened times, to thousands of dark-skinned citizens whose homes have been obliterated by hurricanes. Eventually.

Until rather late in the century past, husbands could legally beat and rape their wives. Now spouses need divorce lawyers to rape and bludgeon each other. 20th-century women were subject to tyrannical standards about what they could become and how they should behave--but they could be visibly mammals, and not just in the chest. Now, still far from acheiving equality in careers and pay, women are supposed to have breasts rivalling the elephants' but otherwise be bald as fish over every inch of our bodies, except for our eyebrows and the hair on our heads, which is supposed to be brown-with-blond highlights even if we're 95 years old. Most women also honestly buy into the cultural assumption that we should age, but not wrinkle. We are not far from the day in which women go off to fight wars camouflaged, armed to the teeth, bikini waxed and Botoxed.

And that's another thing that has changed--wars. Not just because of women in the ranks and high technology, either. The whole rationale for wars has been transformed. In the 20th century, we fought wars because the opposing armies and their despotic rulers were worthless warmongering scum. Now we fight in wars because the whole region is populated with worthless warmongering, terrorist-harboring scum, and we intend to make them have peaceful democratic elections if we have to turn the whole damn country into a smoking crater.

We may have a bit of obsessive-compulsion going on when it comes to starting (and refusing to end) our armed conflicts. Isn't it great that we know what psychiatric labels to give this mindset? MAKE PEACE NOW AND TURN OVER THE TERRORISTS FOR US TO KILL OR WE'LL BOMB YOU INTO OBLIVION. Our wars are a smidge bipolar, a bit schizoid. The President has unresolved father-pleasing issues. However, in the past, people had undiagnosed and untreated mental disorders, which wreaked havoc on their lives and the lives of their loved ones. We now all know what our disorders are and what drugs we ought to be taking for them. We hope the diagnosis remains, because the pills make us feel so much better. The biggest plus is our new ability to bring up one another's diagnoses in arguments, which scores big points and destroys relationships that much faster. "Well, if you weren't so ADBPOCD. . ."

Since it's an election year, we can all be grateful that modern times allow us to find out What Candidates Stand For. Isn't that stupendous? It makes the electoral process so much simpler, don't you think? Nobody had any idea years ago what candidates stood for, only that they stood a few inches taller than the other rich white guy and could give a good speech. Now, thanks to TV and the Internet, we know that every single presidential candidate, irrespective of party, including the incumbent who has stubbornly maintained the status quo for nearly a decade, Stands for Change. It's a beautiful thing. I could cry when I think of my forbears stumbling blindly off to the polls without being able to visit their candidate's web site first. How did they know that he was a champion of educational opportunities for children? That on the matter of senior citizens starving to death in abject poverty, he was decidedly opposed? That war might be a lousy idea overall, except in a place where there might be a concealed terrorist, in which case the exit strategy, if any, must be Given Very Careful Consideration? That the People's Taxes are Too High and the national debt needs to be Addressed Immediately but that we need several Expensive Government Initiatives? That above all, we need Change?

So here we are, in a new century/millennium of almost empty cracker boxes, inextricable toys, goutless feet, potentially incendiary hair gel, tranquilizers, Botox, and making peace through war. I for one am not going back to the good old days. Not even for Fred MacMurray.