My Decade in Review
Inspired by The Guardian’s My Decade in Review Series, my try at the same.
For me, the noughties didn’t begin until September 11, 2001. I could count swilling champagne on the Philadelphia waterfront a start, but that would be belying my own cognizance of the world at the time. Instead I, along with three-hundred million other Americans, was wakened from my consumerist slumber on that autumn morning.
I was 15 and in English class when the news broke. I spent the day clamoring for more data, more information on what was occurring, and who perpetrated the crime. The first day was substantial, like a heavy meal made of iron ore that rests in your stomach never to evade your mind. You sit and bare witness, discuss very little, doubled over in your own discomfort. In the flight path of America’s capital and capitol, the noise stopped. My world stopped. But for the first time there was noise in my mind, and the minds of millions of Americans.
In the days, months, and years after I learned of the horrors of war from the same armchair of others. We sat, we watched, we supported. Rarely did we emote. Mostly, we just grieved for the lives lost, stood confused at the choices, and winced at the realities of our new world. For myself, an American landlocked until the age of 17, I knew little of Afghanistan or Iraq. I did not know their people. I only knew their plans.
When entering college, it became easier to justify not knowing. This was only because so many peers who cared not to know surrounded me. While many of America’s youth had positions and thoughts of their own on the Bush administration’s actions, many also preferred to ignore it and load their pockets. These financial cave dwellers, stoked by the fear of disaster, looked for jobs that would insure their enjoyment. In the cloud of dust in New York, the bankers that built the crisis were born. Their minds had been cultured in a want of security, and they would do anything to build their capitalistic castles out of greenbacks.
And while the leading government of the free world murdered and conquered, we sat in wait. Many were upset. Many saw their morals, humanist morals, fading in our post-modernist malaise. Machiavelli had come to reign. We need merely watch.
But of course this would all end. All of the hording, of wealth and security, would crumble. Overconfidence pushed a once great nation into Iraq, and it would drag our military down and a once stable country with it. Afghanistan would remain a mess, though more controllable than the other. But how could we build the democratic morality of two states a world away, whose culture was not our own, when we ourselves had no culture?
The crumble abroad eventually turned within. Our shared morals, those that were to bring America together, belief in humanity, equality, and scientific progress of man, were under threat by a far right conglomeration. They had built themselves castles in the country to shelter themselves from the cities, the cauldrons of the diversity that had once made America great. They called the Latino immigrants “illegal aliens” considering them more closely related to E.T. than their forebears who had emigrated through Ellis Island. They shunned and stained those of mixed race, little faith, and differing sexuality. For them, fears of the unknown were the building blocks of their lives.
And as our wars abroad simmered, so did our war at home. The nation was like a coke addict, bumping a drug called prosperity until the bitter end. When Lehman Brothers fell in September 2008, it shattered just as many a mind as September 11. The fear that had stoked two wars and a decade of greed now turned into a last desperate dash to horde what one had left. From the bankers who insured their established place in American society through back office deals and declining discount rates, to the politicians who blamed it all on one man who had failed us before, to the American people who could not, for one moment, conceive it was their greed, their desire for more which had turned the world in on itself, we all failed.
A decade that started with such promise for the West whimpered on its way out. Yes, our access to information is better than ever before. Advances in technology had taken us to new domains, digital and industrial. But these very developments look to choke the planet that begat us in the first place, by strangling our Earth, our lungs, our life. Where 2000 brought the world together in celebration of our common humanity in getting this far, the next decade tore us apart and left us more divided and desperate than we have been since World War II. Sometimes I wish I could go back to those days by the riverbank, unaware of what to come, sheltered in a virgin buzz under the stars of a new millennium.