Before I go on, I want to address those of you who are upset with me because the new decade doesn't start until 2021 and I obviously don't understand basic numbers. Yes, I'm aware that there was no "year zero" and that we start counting everything with the number one. But I'm not a math fundamentalist. I think that, for example, it's symbolically more meaningful when your car odometer turns over to 100,000 miles than 100,001. So try not to get too riled up and let's get on with it.
Unfortunately, I'm at an age where the last 10 years are indistinguishable from the 10 before that. Wasn't the turn of the century just 10 years ago? Seems like only yesterday, we ate a cake that said, "Welcome 2000" and accidentally shot live fireworks into the woodpile.
Ever since 2000, I've said we are living in the future. The elders among us might remember how in the 1960s and 70s, predictions of the future always started with, "By the year 2000 ..." which seemed impossibly far away. And now? Smart phones. Self-driving cars. They still seem like science fiction to me. On the other hand, I struggle to remember how we got to our friends' homes in the suburbs without GPS. Did we really fumble around with paper maps that we could never fold back to their original state?
Some of the decade's highlights for me personally:
- I got legally married and I'm still amazed about that.
- I became Episcopalian.
- I went from middle age to upper middle age.
- I bought a house riddled with stupid problems.
- I got a Kindle reader.
- It became legal for same sex couples to marry.
- There is a general trend towards legalizing marijuana.
- "They" as a singular, personal pronoun came into acceptance.
- There are more good programs on TV than ever before and thanks to DVRs and streaming, we can watch them at our own convenience.
- The U.S. accelerated on its journey to hell with shady Republicans engineering voter suppression and other stunts. These culminated in an illiterate, immoral, psychopath in the white house and a supreme court that will halt progressive changes at every turn for years to come.
- Climate change and global warming continued to worsen while we basically continued to not do much about it.
- Corporations figured out how to gather even more reams of data on us through technology that we bring into our homes on purpose. It's so bad now that experts recommend putting a piece of low tech tape over the camera on your new television because, theoretically and technically, someone out there could be watching you..
