The final year of a century and, certainly, the final year of a century before a new millennium, are historically major years for making observations, projections and prophecies about the future.

I read in a recent column by William Pfaff: "...we still have very little idea of what will actually emerge as the great themes of (the 21st) century. A look back at the beginning of (the 20th) century confirms this by its demonstration of how remote the expectation and concerns of people in 1899 were from what actually was to happen to them and to their civilization....There is no good reason to think that our insight today is any better."

In 1899, at the end of the 19th century, all sorts of ideas were advanced as to the fate of our own 20th century.

It was to be a time of universal wealth and plenty. No one foresaw the famines which would wipe out millions in Africa, China, et al., or the worldwide financial depression that began in 1929 and soured the lives of a generation, or the hundreds of millions of people who live in a state of desperate poverty and starvation today.

The 20th century was to be marked by brilliant tech- nological and scientific advances which would be used for the good of mankind. No one foresaw the atomic and the hydrogen bombs, or the use of blinding mustard gas in the trenches of World War I, or the wide use later in our century of biochemicals to sicken and kill not only in declared warfare, but also in the subway system of a major capital city as was to happen in Tokyo in the last decade of the century, a city which already had suffered near total destruction from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and from Allied fire bombs on a night in early 1945.

Our century was to be a time of social programs that would benefit the whole world. No one foresaw the totalitarian dictatorships rampant even today, or the cancerous spread of communism like a miasma around the globe.

It was to be a time of medical triumph over every disease known then to man. No one foresaw the scourge of AIDS which, apart from its devastation of a gay generation, is the leading cause of death in Africa today, where it is primarily a "heterosexual" disease.

None foresaw the truth of our bloody century of wars, the Holocaust, the extermination of millions. No one. Such horrors were inconceivable in 1899. Such horrors were, instead, thought to be miseries of the past, as when the Mongol hordes swept into Europe slaughtering all in their path hundreds of years before.

In 1899, Lenin was living in exile in Sibera. Stalin was a devout young divinity student. Hitler was a 10-year-old boy doted upon by his mother.

Who could have known?

It is true that our century has produced a flood of positive images and unimaginable progress in departure from the ways of all previous centuries known to man. We went to the moon. We have seen extraordinary close-up photographs in 3-D of the canals of Mars.

Yet, much of mankind is still mired in the mud of gross materialism despite the efforts of truly spiritual people like Mohandas Gandhi in standing up for the individual rights and worth of man, no matter his socio-economic status or his religious beliefs. Most religions still continue to mock the grandeur of civilized man's innate initiative to touch the stars without any help from an outside source. They offer petty arguments about who is to be allowed on the path to higher apirations, and who is not. Even worse, they strive in the political arena to repress man's and woman's individuality and to oppress those whose views and orientations do not relate to what they arrogantly conceive of as their specific godhead's "law."

Perhaps the best we can hope for the 21st century and its new millennium is that we will still be here to celebrate its entry and to meet it with the exalted expectation that it will be a great improvement over the one to which we will be bidding goodbye.