Farewell 2009 and Welcome 2010. There's a lot of retrospectives in print, on the air and on line in recent days as we turn the page on the first decade of Y2K. Remember the concerns, sometimes approaching panic, at what might be happening to our way of life ten years ago because of computer code that most of us didn't understand in the first place?
Do you recall the wrangling that went on for months over who had been elected President in 2000? Less than an eye blink later (historically speaking) we held hands in a global seance as passenger airliners crashed into buildings and crushed the last bit of naivete any of us might have had about Donne's Tolling Bell. The sound of collapsing steel and glass signaled the arrival of the Dogs of War and men of hate (With no cause, we don't discriminate). We discovered people who have nothing to live for will find something to die for and then they will want you to die for it, too.
In ten years we completed the triumph of Capitalism, as even "Red China", the People's Republic, embraced greed while attempting to maintain its pride of place as the Proletariat's Playground. Here in the USA, we waved good-bye to the last of those jobs involved in the actual making of something, opting, instead to sell one another fast food and porn clips as everywhere else on earth became a better choice for a manufacturer to be based.
More of us owned stock than at any time in our history even if we weren't sure what ownership meant or entailed. It was okay, we had a 'guy for that', remember? And it all worked great until it suddenly stopped working and then we discovered the fire sale on blue smoke and mirrors we were having. To our credit (pun intended) we sorted through all of that, with some excursions into pointlessness of course (when did search for the guilty become part of solving the problem?) and as this decade ends, many are, for the most part, financially almost where they were ten years ago. Or, as I'm fond of saying, when we were ten years better.
How we got here isn't, to me, nearly as important as what we do next, when we do it and when we begin. Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted, and while a lot of us rival Jimi, it's nearly as much about what we don't know as what we do know. Stasis can only lead to decay and decline because there is no standing still, only forwards or backwards. What we think about the next decade when it reaches its end depends on what we make of it-and now is the moment to play the game existence to the end of the beginning.
-bill kenny
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