Now, I’ve always treasured my thinking time – as I’m sure many self obsessed art-y types do, and like my obnoxious poetry reading brethren – this is because I value the task of reflection. Thinking back on how I arrived to wherever I happen to be allows me the comfort of creating – however fictitious it may be – some semblance of sense in my tiny little life. In order to have this sense of, well, sense, I have to force myself to keep the scope fairly narrow, which has become more and more difficult with the hopes of a new decade fast approaching.
Let’s be clear: I understand that I have neither the knowledge, nor the will for that matter to put every event that has occurred in the past ten years into a grand focus. I am chiefly concerned – both for this article and for myself – with those things that I have personally found interesting – pretentious I know. Yet, despite all my best efforts, my narrow focus on the data to be analyzed and the opinions of my far more intelligent and down-to-earth friends, I am struggling with finding a through-line or theme, let alone meaning to this closing decade.
Do you remember Y2K? That was dumb wasn’t it? And that’s what started this section of time for us, hmmm… foreshadowing? How about 2012? Why are we so obsessed with apocalypse? Even better: do you remember when there was concern over the proliferation of PS2’s and Xbox’s to China because there was (apparently) enough American computing know-how that they could be used to remotely launch nuclear warheads (I may have twisted this fact in my head along the way somewhere so take it with a grain of salt)? Regardless of its truth its stupid.
In the last 10 years we have moved from what I would see as the end of the excitement around the advancement of technology to… well… I’m not quite sure. Now, I’m not saying that technology isn’t advancing at an incredibly fast rate. It is. I recognize that. But we’re not frightened or amazed like we used to be when car engines turn on via voice recognition. Things like that used to make even the most tech savvy of us scream hallelujah and now we’re disappointed if our tiny handheld phone doesn’t take HD quality video while syncing our calendars while price checking the cost of a dvd on amazon. I guess what I’m getting at is that the crazy technology (minus robot butlers and hover-boards – I know, I’m disappointed too) is not only here, but we’ve got used to it. The point being, that this decade wasn’t really about technology. Oh yeah! Remember 9-11? Remember Osama Bin Laden? War on terror? Weapons of mass destruction? What happened there? Sadam Hussein and Iraq? Again, this decade had two – I would venture to say – significant wars (or maybe better described as thinly veiled oil explorations) and a multitude of terrorist attacks across the world but this isn’t the first thing that crosses my mind when I think 2000 – 2009. There is definitely a new type of fear that exists across the world, new airport security measures, new big brother laws that inch us ever closer to 1984 – but again these events don’t solely define our decade.
It seems as though that when I put into perspective these and all the other elements that come to mind the only thing that seems to boil to the top is a sense of nonchalance about the history we’ve etched out for ourselves. We have carved out ten years of history and I don’t think we’ve put a whole lot of thought into it. From climate change to organic food, healthy active lifestyles and gay rights (in countries that aren’t totally backwards) it seems as though we’ve all heard the story before.
Now, I’m not yearning for the pastoral times of yore, what I’m saying is that we’ve hit something akin to a media/information saturation point that is allowing us to consider – and maybe for the first time – where we are, simply because we’ve had enough opinions, information, facts and whatever else thrust at us; and after digesting the past ten years I think we’re all realizing we don’t know how we’ve got here. The last ten years have been a wave of stuff that has happened and we’ve found out about all of this stuff in a million ways at once and were therefore unable to understand any of it in context of events or of the people involved. It’s as if we’ve been on auto-pilot the past ten years and we’ve finally come back to the cockpit to find that even though we haven’t exploded we’re not where we think we should be ten years into the 21st century.
I don’t think it’s just me either. Both the arts and popular media have hit on this theme and I think its worth taking a moment to reflect upon. If acceptance is the first step I’m not really sure either about what the next one needs to be.
