As The Ball Drops: 2000 Decade in Review

December 30th, 2009

We are officially twenty four hours away from the end of, what TIME Magazine referred to as "The Worst Decade in History" and "The Decade from Hell." I'd like to take a few minutes with you, my friends and readers, to reflect upon the years that have past and the reality which they have wrought.

The changes in my life have been evident, but the vast majority of those changes are inevitable. Regardless of the age, most children aging from 9 to 19 will experience several of the same things I have experienced over the past ten years. There are several changes and memories, however, that are distinctly 00-ian. TIME discusses how, despite the fact that there was no great Y2K apocalyptic computer meltdown, there might as well have been. Over the past decade, America has witnessed the worst election gaffe in history, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, two wars, the Virginia Tech massacre, and the greatest financial meltdown since the great depression including the widest-reaching Ponzi scheme in history. The world saw a tsunami in Sumatra, America's actions through Guantanamo Bay, and the destruction created from two wars and North Korea becoming a nuclear threat. The American Dream appears to have shattered... or did it?

I'm not normally an "ends justify the means" kind of guy, but this is my exception. I'd like to take this opportunity to compare where we as a city, state, and nation were ten years ago today.

So where were we on December 29th, 1999? What were we doing?

We were freaking out.

A common theme throughout the 1990's was Americans not knowing what to do with themselves. There were blips of realistic fear, such as Columbine, but they were often fleeting risks and more hype than substance. Nonetheless, Americans weren't used to not having something to fear. After decades of Cold War, the Berlin Wall falls, democracy spreads, and the world seemed relatively quiet to the United States. Sometimes it's the silence that can be deadly, however, and that was the overriding theme that shaped the 1990's. Without the Soviets to fear, many Americans needed to fill that void in their life with something. This led to the introduction of greater fear of our own government, fear of our own kids, and the list goes on and on.

This is what led to the fear of our own computer system failing on January 1st, 2000. While this fear may not have been ultimately justified, it spoke a great deal to the culture of the nineties and where we were as a nation at that moment. The 2000 election was another example of mass fear exacerbating a situation. If Americans would have stayed calm and quiet, Florida would have done a recount and Al Gore would have been President. Instead, the citizens of chaos did what they were best at, with the assistance of the 24 hour news media, and created mass chaos that led the Supreme Court to override the Constitution and Florida's rights as a state and gave the election to George W. Bush.

Consequently, the culture of the nineties led us headfirst into the new millennium under the leadership of a man whose qualifications for the President of the United States may not have been ideal. Instead of the Vice President who helped oversee the greatest economic expansion of the 20th century and scored a 1355 on his SAT, we were handed a C student who scored lower than I did on the SAT and drove an oil company and a baseball team into the ground.

Hold onto your hats, folks, here comes an interesting decade.

Then came 9/11, and everything changed. Now we remembered that there are real things out there to fear, and that we are truly one nation. Afghanistan and Iraq happened and we were, for lack of a better word, shell shocked. This is what shaped the culture of the 2000's.

Suddenly, however, something interesting happened. The nineties "fear everything" mentality was merged with our real fears of terrorism, hurricanes, and financial crises and America was, honestly, not a fun place to live. Some blindly followed their President and others rigorously opposed any efforts Bush made, regardless of intent or consequence. We were torn more politically than any other time in our history, and the animosity that stemmed from the 2008 election evinced that fact. As we progress into the second decade of the 21st century, however, I remain optimistic.

In spite of the negativity of the 2000's, I remain confident that the oh-ten's will be different. Never in our history have we overcome this much adversity in this short amount of time. There's something special about the group of Americans living here today, because no matter where your political allegiances lie, I'm confident that this is the first group of Americans that is truly putting America first across the board. As usual, we have differing opinions as to how to improve our nation, but everyone here today truly loves their country and is learning not to take it for granted.

At the end of the day, the chaos wrought by the new millennium has developed us into a much more sophisticated populace. I'll never forget the election debacle in 2000, the Bush years, 9/11, Katrina, the brawl, the Colts Super Bowl, Reggie's retirement, the Obama campaign, election night 2008, and the list goes on and on, but all of those experiences, both positive and negative, shaped our world into what it is going to be in 2010.

This chapter is over, now time to start writing for 2019.

I look forward to experiencing the next ten years with you, and this is when I'd like to open the conversation to you. What will you remember about this decade? Was it the worst decade ever? Do the ends justify the means? What do you look forward to from 2010-2019?

I love you guys. Live Hard, Laugh Harder.