Looking for the Silver Lining
It is an internet tradition that every year, usually starting in early December, each and every blog and news outlet with a web presence publishes a cacophony of "Best of", "Worst of", and "This Brought Us The Most Pageviews This Year So We'll Just Bring It Back Under New Year's Pretenses" lists. This year is special because it's the end of a decade as well so we get to make TWO sets of lists. It's so much wankery as to bring me this close to making a list of the top 25 worst end of the year lists. This close.
The only remarkable thing about all the Decade-in-Review and "Best of" lists is how almost unanimously bleak they are. Newsweek's review includes "cataclysmic" and the phrase "the world splits open to the boiling core and remakes itself." Of the 12 slides in CNBC's Decade in Review Slideshow, 11 were demonstrably negative events. All 12 if you consider China's booming economy a bad thing. The Rude Pundit, of whom I am a fan, lets the decade have it in a three part series of invective. And perhaps the greatest downer of them all, The Wall Street Journal reviewed the decade as a return to reality after the fantastical 90s.
It makes some sense to look back on the first decade of this century with some distaste and displeasure.
Acts of nature, terrorism, stupidity, violence, technological ineptitude, nature, greed , nature, and ego unfettered by intelligence certainly marred the landscape. But what decade is without these things? Tragic and evil events are a part of every arbitrary chunk of ten years.
I suspect that some of the dismal reviews of this decade are a result of the let down on its aspirations. I was only 17 at the time, but when the last decade ended, you know what our biggest worry was? Y2K. We went into this decade with so much expectation. The tech bubble had yet to burst and the term "War on Terror" had yet to permeate our thinking. Hell, Bill "You-say-blowjob-like-it's-a-bad-thing!" Clinton was still President. The Aughts are being largely judged as a comparison between '98 & '99 and '08 & '09, and by that metric, there's no doubt the Aughts were a steaming pile.
Even so, it's hard for me personally to look back on the last ten years with much contempt. I graduated from High School and College in the Aughts. I got my first car and made my first cross-country road trip in the Aughts. Sure, we got to watch our public discourse sink faster than the Titanic, but we also got to see the emergence of social media and the power of the internet to transform our way of storing and retrieving information. We got to see perhaps the most impressive Olympic games of our lifetimes. It wasn't all bad.
Like it or not, this decade will come to define the generation that came of age during it, probably in much the same way the tumultuous 60s have since defined the Baby Boomers. So you can either choose to believe that we got the shaft, or that we had an extended trial by fire. I'll take the latter.
Ryan Hindinger
Oh, and if you're actually looking for an in-depth review of the year 2009, you couldn't do any better than this.
Review, The Aughts | in History, The Future