Our Changing Disaster Movie Of A Decade In Review

As we reach the end of the first decade of the 21st century the news is filled with not only year end reviews but also decade end reviews. I began this decade in a simple and unglamorous fashion. In late 1999 my girlfriend’s parents at the time were paranoid Trilateral Commission types convinced that the Y2K threat was real. They weren’t quite to the level of building a bomb shelter and collecting can goods, but they forbid my girlfriend at the time from going out to any function. We spent the evening sitting in my good friend Meghan’s living room with one other friend. As Lewis Black later pointed out, we could watch people having more fun in other countries on television and knew there was no threat, but oh well.

Prior to this decade disasters where the exclusive domain of television and movies. We also thought that we had left the high political drama behind with the Clinton impeachment. The rest of the decade from the election of 2000 on would be characterized by the phrase, “everything changed.” Everything did change after the disputed election of 2000. That historic election gave us the concept of “red” and “blue” states. This concept would later devolve into the concept of purple states, which is just absurd. In Florida we experienced first hand the recount fiasco that made our state the butt of jokes, until California relieved us of that by electing Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. The election also marked the last I would participate in as a registered Republican.

Republican George W. Bush was on shaky ground with the American public going into the fall of 2001 after the bizarre stand-off with the Chinese earlier that year. Then our decade became a disaster movie. The staggering tragedy of the attacks of September 11th again changed everything. I never experienced the television drama that the entire country and world experienced that horrible morning, as I had worked very late and had slept in. My mother had the piece of mind to realize that and woke me just as the second tower fell. All the days events came at me at once and like many I broke down. With my girlfriend of three years having dumped me just two weeks earlier, that month would portend the trend that my decade would take.

Within two years the nation would become embroiled in two wars halfway across the world and the Iraq invasion would be the final straw. I left the Republican party as it cravenly began to use the tragedy of 9/11 to shred the 4th amendment and launch wars unrelated the fight against terrorism to settle scores. The forerunner of my blogging started at this time as I began to write angry letters to the editor of the local newspapers. When my grandparents began to express dismay at my sudden turn against the Republican party to my mother I decided to start writing letters under a pseudonym. I gave the letter writer the first name Dagny as a subtle dig back to my ex-girlfriend’s love of Ayn Rand. I had ten of these letters published as a nice balance to the predominance of conservatives in Northern Florida. The day after John Kerry was defeated by George W. Bush I walked into the supervisor of elections office and changed my affiliation to Democrat. Over the course of this wretched decade I have been a registered republican, registered independent, and registered democrat.

The decade of disaster movie reality progressed from the destruction of the Shuttle Columbia, to the staggering horror of hurricane Katrina. A major American city was practically wiped off the map, and contributed to the political downfall of Bush. The disaster of Katrina showed a decline in American power to the rest of the world and changed everything. To this day my friends in New Orleans tell me the city is no where near rebuilt, nearly five years later.

The Democrats finally rebuilt their party and retook the House and Senate in 2006 and we heard the words “Madame Speaker” said for the first time. The loss in 2004 did mark the first national appearance of Barack Hussein Obama. Leading into 2008 he would change everything again as our political reality would most resemble something from Hollywood fantasy. A woman and an black man would fight an epic primary battle for the ages that would reach every state and territory in the Union. That same black man would fill a football stadium for his nomination acceptance speech. John McCain also changed everything by giving us the gift of then Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. That election would be turned on yet another disaster, as the American financial system nearly collapsed in a way that the worst of the Y2K paranoid could have imagined.

The country has been beaten and battered and challenged in ways that we all could have scarcely imagined in that apartment with my ex-girlfriend and friend Meghan that New Years eve 1999. Yet we’ve faced difficult decades before. For all the horrible things that this decade has brought us, there have been wonders to experience. It gave us wonders like the iPhone, and my Gators won two national titles. I was able to see the west coast for the first time and fall in love with the American west. We welcome a new decade on January 1st, and I cannot wait to see what the screenwriters have set for us next.