About a year ago today I saved a Reuters newsfile and I have been pondering its significance ever since. The story polled ad agencies and design firms in 41 countries about color trends, and concluded that the color for the new millennium would be --- blue.

This is not a joke. They really did this.

"Though there is some debate over what color consumers will most associate with the year 2000 and beyond, our research shows that the clear front-runner is blue,'' the Brand Futures group at advertising agency Young & Rubicam said.

The runner-up was green, favored because of its photosynthetic connotations. The rainforests will be gone, but their tradition will survive in our window treatments.

The results could have been worse. What if the word came down that the next one thousand years would take its cue from some lesser crayon in the box, like burnt sienna, raw umber, or flesh? Or a color designers invented themselves, like sand?

Forget Y2k. This is more important. What could say more about a thousand year epoch future than its signature color, the hue that sums up the aspirations of -- oh, half a trillion human lives -- and their idea, in the aggregate, of who and what they were? Which is to say, blue?

Blue, said those polled, connotes "opening up," wider and wider, like sky and water, limitlessness and peace. In an epoch likely to be characterized by mass manipulation and global genocide, the color of choice will connote the innocent spirit of a child, the hem of a virgin saint. If ordinary paper covers rock, blue paper metamorphoses it into a bird, a mountain bluebird, that flies away.

Wild. Blue. Yonder.

Blue is the color of heaven, that also enfolds the earth. It connotes unity, transcendence, eternity. It is the color of introspection, and the clear, clean feeling that is like the inhalation just preceding great joy.

It is the color of pigmentless eyes, our melanin defense against burning light stripped away. To be blue is to be a child forever, untainted and unblamable. Baby blues. Pale blue eyes. Ol' blue eyes. Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Knowing that blueness suggests these things, the world of commerce is hard at work capitalizing on these faint stirrings. Blue will be the millennium's answer to mass manipulation and global genocide. We will look past the smoking ruins of evil to the penetrating blue that sees through the machinations of men.

And it will also be built into the justifications for these things. Because the big money Young & Rubicam consults for will need to explain things in terms that reach down to our souls. Which is what this is -- not market research, but soul research.

We will still spend money. But the meaning of the money will come from deep inside us, from out of the fiduciary blue.

Identify a subconscious connection in the human heart, the theory goes, and you can design products people will yearn to consume and policies they will clamor to endorse without quite knowing why.

In the beginning was blue jeans, which begat Aqua Velva, which begat blue mineral water, which begat Big Blue, which begat the blue iMac.

Blue mineral water, blue marble baths, blue make-up, blue letterhead, blue screensavers. The blue plate special, bluefish with aerosol bleu cheese. Blue Mondays, Blue Meanies, blue movies, blue highways. Blue ridge mountains, blue point Siamese. Blue Cheer.

I have seen Viagra, and it is blue.

I find the findings astounding. It was astounding to me that the character and aspect of the next thousand years, with all the living, dying, and general upheaval that we and thirty generations of posterity will be expected to do, would be governed by what color we most respond to.

It will probably go down the way they say it will. And the remarkable part is that we know the answer already. All that living and dying and upheaval stuff will just be sort of a postscript:

And everyone ever after experienced stress and struggle. But they never lost heart nor averted their eyes from the blue beyond that gave meaning to their world.

They all died. Except for the hopeful handful left over at the end, who rhapsodized about the coming 3000s, when we would surely turn a corner, and a better, more spiritual color would light the way.

Chartreuse, anyone?

Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995 Table of contents and sample chapters of this book... Just click on the book cover to order your signed copy for only $12.95. Table of contents and sample chapters of this book... Why Change Doesn't Work: Why Initiatives Go Wrong and How to Try Again and Succeed Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley Hardcover Just click on the book cover to order your signed copy for only $12.95. "This is the first treatise on change we've seen that is actually entertaining. The authors cover human and organizational barriers to change and change theories, and then take a tour of management theory that's guaranteed to upset every reader at one point or another." -- HR ONLINE Table of contents and sample chapters of this book...

Why not bookmark Mike's columns for your weekly enjoyment?

Stimulate the economy, give a poet a dollar.

I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did it for free. But this writer is currently out of work, and a bit of revenue would gladden his heart. If you'd like to contribute to this site, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor Box" here. Just click the CLICK TO PAY image here. Thanks - Mike