The Moneylove New Millennium Challenge

The Start Of A New Millennium And None Too Soon!

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I have been writing about seeing 2010 as the opportunity to have a do over of The New Millennium, which has been pretty disappointing for most people. Two questions in my 110 Questions For 2010 list address this:

What one word or phrase best describes your experience of the first decade of the new century?

Did you accomplish the following in relationship to your expectations in 1999 for the then impending New Millennium?
___Everything I wanted and more.
___Most of what I wanted.
___Hardly anything I wanted or desired.
___Nothing I planned or expected.

Of course, for me, answering this type of question is a basic no-brainer. On New Year’s 2000, I was in a cell at Pleasant Valley State Prison. I just spent Christmas visiting my cellmate from then, Keith Crawford. We reminisced about staying up all night and watching the festive celebrations around the world for the dawn of the New Millennium. A very hopeful and optimistic time–it just didn’t work out that way for most people.

In one sense, I think it might be useful to adopt for the past decade that same attitude often recommended in talking about another person, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” In which case, you wouldn’t hear a mention of 2000-2009. But, in another sense, it probably is important to put a label on the decade just ending so we are free to move into a new one, and my recommended do over of the entire start of the New Millennium. On ABC’s This Week, in their online Green Room segment, the four Roundtable panelists were asked to name the decade just ending.

David Brooks, conservative columnist for The New York Times, and perhaps my favorite pundit even though we don’t share political views, said he would have to go with The Decade of Hate because of Islamic extremism and domestic political hatred. Nobel Prize winner and Professor of Economics Paul Krugman, also a NY Times columnist, said it was The Big Zero with “zero job growth, zero gain in stocks, zero credibility for our financial system. Lots of things came up empty and we didn’t get Osama Bin Laden dead or alive.”

Washington Post editorial writer Ruth Marcus said instead of a decade called “aughts,” it should be known as The Decade Of Oughts because “We ought to have got things under control and we didn’t. It was a wasted decade.”

And, finally, Republican strategist Malcolm Dowd said it was The Loss Of Illusion Decade “because on 9/11 we lost the illusion that we were safe here in our country, we lost the illusion that we were somehow financially safe, we lost illusions about all the major institutions, and it was appropriate that it was all capped at the end by the Tiger Woods episode, which destroyed the illusion that he was a totally focused and disciplined athlete who only had his mind on his golf game.” But Dowd was optimistic that we are now ready for a decade of reality and truth.

I agree, the dismal performance of these past ten years sets us up beautifully for a new start, a rare and precious time for a do over. So Happy New Year and Happy New Millennium.
Jerry