In spite of great tragedy, the decade was notable for technological, scientific, and social advancement

by Maddy Bullard

We are a decade without a name. The first ten years of the 21st century, from 2001 to 2010, have yet to gain an “official” title. Suggestions have been made –”the noughties” (from the word “naught,” which is used around the English-speaking world), “the O’s”, “the zeros” or “double zeroes”. But do any of these names fit our generation, our decade?

Due to some of the detrimental events that occurred both in the U.S. and around the world (September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina, and the worldwide economic recession of recent months, to name a few) some have ventured to christen the decade “The Decade from Hell,” “The Reckoning,” the “Decade of Broken Dreams” or even the “Lost Decade”.

These alternative suggestions likely come from people who reason that because of the myriad of bad things that have happened in the past 10 years, the decade will go down in history as one of the worst we have known.

Certainly history will remember the tragedies, the mistakes, the trials and tribulations the world has experienced in the past decade. But I would argue it wasn’t all bad. After all, the human race has made at least a few strides since the close of the nineties.

Perhaps the most obvious success of the decade was the election of Barack Obama, a multiracial American politician, as president of the United States. Voters around the U.S., from an endless variety of backgrounds, ages and socioeconomic situations, were told to hope, to dream — and they did.

In a country that, less than 150 years ago, was ravaged by the evils of civil war and still healing from the wounds of slavery, this accomplishment is truly remarkable. Whether the administration will live up to the hopes of those who voted for it remains to be seen.

On a different world stage, that of science and technology, incredible advances have also been made. The Human Genome Project, which began in the nineties, has mapped the more than 20,000 genes that make up the human genome.

Although this development may seem insignificant to the average person, it has implications for societies around the world. The knowledge this discovery can afford scientists will be invaluable in predicting and studying genetic disorders including breast cancer, hemostasis, cystic fibrosis and liver disease, among others.

This decade has also led to the development of wireless Internet, and the production and perfection of the personal computer, cell phone and portable media player. For some, the decade should perhaps be known as “the Age of Apple”.

The iPod has become ubiquitous in high school environments like that of Clayton. The convenience and speed of wireless Internet has afforded academics and professionals alike with unprecedented access to a wealth of information, whose magnitude is growing every day.

Now ever-present cell phones allow for connections even across vast distances. Not just phone calls, but also texting, instant messaging, Skype, video chatting, and built-in laptop and cell phone cameras have allowed for almost unlimited access to friends and family.

A certain awareness of the global, human community has also led to new developments in the areas of both environmental protection and civil liberties.

During the past decade, warnings of climate change and global warming have rung out from televisions, radios and podiums worldwide. Although there is still a long journey ahead of us, progress has been made as conscientious communities respond to those warnings. Carbon emissions are still unaccountably high, especially considering the contributions made by only a few countries of the world, mainly the United States. But awareness is the first step, and awareness is spreading rapidly and widely.

Some of the tragedies that have occurred in the past decade have brought with them a silver lining of sorts.

The economic downturn, while troublesome for many, has hopefully taught Wall Street a lesson. With the seemingly unending news of embezzlement, money laundering and inside jobs in big, powerful companies, the American public has hopefully begun to understand a truth about the economy — that it is more complicated than it may appear.

The outrage Americans have shown at the heinous salaries of Wall Street executives, at the “bonuses” they receive after leaving their messes for the government to clean up, at the corrupt, unscrupulous companies that are “too big to fail” should be sending a message. The American people have hopefully woken up, and will now be more cautious, more discerning, and will now, at last, make the effort to be more informed.

The past decade has undeniably been a challenge. The human race has lived on, through struggle and through conflict, and sometimes in peace and prosperity.

Was this the worst decade we, as humans, have experienced? Was it as bad as the Civil War in the United States? Did it compare to the French Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Holocaust? Was this decade really as hellish as some say?

I would argue that it was not. Every decade has its ups and downs, the good and the bad. Some are, inevitably, more balanced than others. If nothing else, this decade will serve as proof that we can survive through tough times, that we are a resilient, hardy and irrepressible race of people. In the future, some may look back on this decade as a failure. But at least it will be a failure that we survived.

With global warfare, terrorist attacks, and economic turmoil, the decade was dominated by pervasive fear.

by Kara Kratcha

With food stored in basements and batteries hoarded in excess, the decade started out on a note of irrational anxiety. At midnight on December 31, 1999, Y2K arrived to a relieved, “Happy New Year.” And thus the first decade of the new millennium began. However, it was the sort of anxiety leading up to the celebration, not the relief, which would come to mark the 2000s.

The decade’s tone was perhaps more substantially set on 12 December 2000 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of George W. Bush as the nation’s next president. The winner could not be determined without careful examination of votes from the state of Florida, whose Electoral College votes Bush won by a margin of less than a thousand.  More than ever, America was a nation divided.

However, it was not America’s dichotomy of a political system that will come to the decade that is now coming to a close.

On September 11, 2001, a series of al-Qaeda suicide bombers performed the attack heard ‘round the world as they drove an airplane into each of the two towers of the World Trade Center.

Thus a new word introduced to the American psyche: terror. Before this decade, the Homeland Security Advisory System, the color-coded scale used to gauge levels of terrorism threat, did not exist. Before this decade, arriving at an airport hours before a scheduled flight’s departure time was unnecessary, and “travel-sized” meant “small enough to fit in a carryon,” not “small enough to legally bring on an airplane.”

Before this decade, the term “War on Terror” would have seemed vague, perhaps even like something out of a child’s bedtime story about a struggle between good and evil. Today that war, while still vague, is very real and very frightening for many Americans.
On Oct 7, 2001, the United States officially declared war in Afghanistan.  From that point on, America was, and still is, at war, a creating a negative outlook of fear and confusion that would permeate the entire decade. The aim of the mission, to capture Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda officials, to destroy al-Qaeda as an organization, and to end the Taliban regime, has not yet been achieved.

Meanwhile, even nature seems to be against the first decade of the new millennium. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, destroying the city and displacing millions of people. Homes were ruined, leaving mold and water damage in their places.

The natural disaster was bad enough, but what many believe was government mismanagement left people to suffer without food, shelter, fresh water or protection from violence in the aftermath of the storm. Some families lived in government-provided trailers long after the storm had passed, while others sought refuge as far away as the Midwest.

While the physical effects of Katrina eventually blew over, the storm increased in some a distrust in the American government that could be seen everywhere from the dissenting opinions on the War in Iraq to the increasingly popular phenomenon of “Bush bashing.”

Then, in the midst of a far away war and political parties vying for the Presidential office, the world economy suffered a major hit. The Stock Market sunk, oil prices were high, housing prices plummeted, long-standing banks shut down, and American citizens everywhere asked themselves whether a second Great Depression was descending, this time on a global economy so interdependent that any one major country’s fiscal failure could cause other economies to come crashing down. The fear of war suddenly became the fear of losing a job, of having to file for bankruptcy.

The economy is not the only global problem of the 2000s, however. Even more recently, the H1N1 virus, or “Swine Flu,” scared nations all around the world. The World Health Organization deemed the outbreak a global pandemic, the only such classification in more than forty years, on June 1, 2009. Now scared for their health as well as their wallets, Americans waited for vaccines and assurance that Swine Flu was not going to cause more casualties where they lived.

Luckily, there does seem to be an end in sight to this anxiety-filled decade. The war shows at least a small chance of ending soon, holiday shopping is showing signs of improvement from last year’s, and H1N1 seems like less and less of a threat. President Barack Obama has promised change, and with a little bit of his coveted hope, perhaps second decade of the new millennium will be one of growth, prosperity and peace.

The first decade of the second millennium has been marked throughout by fear. The fear of technological failure, the fear of terrorists, the fear of economic downturn, and the fear of illness have all marked the decade and probably created an overall negative feeling regarding it.

With no glaringly positive events or life-saving inventions, things do not bode well for the first ten years of the 2000’s legacy.