The 20th Century decade: What have the last ten years been about?

The Twenties had their roar. The Thirties, the Depression. The Forties, a war.
The Fifties was the Age of Anxiety and the bomb. In the Sixties, the times were a’changing.
The Seventies were the decade of bad clothes and lying politicians.
The Eighties were all about the spread of consumerism and the end of the Cold War.
The halcyon Nineties was a decade of blind luck where about the only thing we had to focus our attention on were Big Bill’s lewd indiscretions in the Oval Office and the infamous blue dress.
So, what has this past decade, which will come to end in a quick month and half, been all about? What shorthand name will historians use to refer to it as?
I propose the 20th Century Decade.
There was a roar, that of those planes on Sept. 11.
We’ve experienced a near depression with the crash of the housing market, banks and auto companies. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq do not come close to the enormity of World War II, but it’s also been a decade of overseas conflict.
We’ve had no shortage of anxieties and the election of the first black president is definitely a sign times have a’changed.
The widespread popularity of Crocs is evidence we can still have bad taste in the style department and politicians continue to lie.
Consumerism now runs rampant not just in America, but all over the world.
John Edwards, Ted Stevens and Mark Sanford have shown America that the lascivious behavior of politicians will never seem to end.
In short, the Two Thousands seem to encapsulate a lot of the characteristics of the whole of the 20th Century in ten short years.
The decade began with the Y2K debacle, where all of us waited for the collapse of the mainframes with doomsday-like fascination. Those anxieties were misplaced. We were worried about our digital creations when we should have been worried about Islamic fundamentalists plotting destruction in caves halfway around the world.
Sept. 11 knocked us out of the dreamy days of the Nineties, creating a new reality, thrusting us back into the world we’d been ignoring since the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
We know the rest: the Bush Administration, taking down the Taliban, the hunt for Osama, the dubious invasion of Iraq, the lack of weapons of mass destruction, the toppling of Sadam’s statue in Baghdad. The wars now seem endless, interminable. The debate about whether or not it’s all just for oil make it even more complex.
Oil brings us to global warming, or what the conservatives like to call climate change. Bush wasn’t sold on its “truthiness.” Al Gore went up and down on his moving platform in “An Inconvenient Truth” and won a Nobel Prize.
As if this wasn’t enough to worry about, the banks collapsed and were bailed out. Companies like General Motors, who once seemed indomitable, were forced to ask for the same favor.
There were no lack of things to worry about in the Naughty Aughties. Since the Age of Anxiety has already been used up, I also propose the years from 2000 to 2010 should be called The Age of Two Thousand Anxieties.
Hopefully, the new decade will also usher in the use of calling the year Twenty Ten. Enough of the Two Thousand and whatever stuff.
Back in the strange old days of the 20th Century, we never had to utter such a mouthful. Save yourself the two syllables.
This will save us some time in conversation. We’ll need that time in the next decade to deal with even more mounting problems as realities outpace the imagination and history moves at an even more berserk pace.
Soon, we’ll be packing in more than a centuries-worth of turmoil into a decade.