As far as decades go… I can not wait for this one to.

What started out as a time of incredible promise, ended as a 10 year epoch of loss- lost lives, security, trust and wealth. It all went very bad, very quickly. I say good riddance.

Do you remember the hand-wringing over the disastrous potential of our computers not calculating the year 2000. It turned out to be a tempest in a teapot. Then September 11, 2001 arrived and we all understood what a real tempest felt like. Out of those ashes and the tragedy of innocent lives lost, we bonded as a country, the likes of which was not seen for 55 years. Alas, those bonds loosed steadily and insidiously as the decade unfolded and yet more lives were lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If 9/11 shattered our sense of security, our sense of trust soon followed with Enron, WorldCom, and other blue-chip lies. These mega-business scandals shocked us. Little did we know that they were preparing us for the unbridled greed of large financial institutions that would nearly topple our economy, along with the economies of the world, but a few short years later. Then there was everyone’s all-star ponzi liar, Bernie Madoff.

As if the loss of lives, security and trust wasn’t enough, we ended the decade by watching millions of jobs and trillion of dollars of wealth disappear before our eyes, seemingly overnight. The government worked feverishly to bail out the too large to fail institutions who laid the squishy foundation for our economic house of cards, while everyday people were allowed to fail in breath-taking numbers. As this decade ends, they are still failing, though we are to take heart that the failures are happening with reduced frequency. Little comfort, that.

Au revoir to the lost decade. It will not be missed. Perhaps the best we can say is that we survived it and learned a few lessons in the process.

Let’s raise a glass to 2010.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.