Wah

I just got around to reading Time Magazine’s article on the ’00 decade, or what Time Magazine calls; The Decade from Hell.

It made me a little upset.

These last ten years were hard; no doubt about that. I know people who have lost a home, lost a job, lost a friend or loved one in Iraq or Afghanistan, a friend in the sunanmi.

I will never forget walking into Grand Central Station four days after the towers went down and seeing signs of missing people…moms, dads, sons, daughters. I will never forget the smell of burning oil in the financial district.

I will never forget watching in horror as people waited in the Louisiana Superdome for help. Surely, this could not be happening in my country.

It’s been a tough ten years. But to condemn us to hell…an eternity of suffering inflicted by small demons seems a little harsh.

Because you know what? Ten years is a long time! If your lucky you get 8? 9? decades in your life? Good things and bad things will happen during this time.

You can take any decade and stack up the bad things….1940: Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, a World War…it’s estimated 50-70 million people died in WWII…talk about hell.

1950: The Korean War, McCarthism, Nuclear Testing, The Cold War

1960: Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy assassinated, MLK assassinated, Vietnam, riots

1970: Vietnam, Kent State, Watergate, Nixon, Leisure suits are all the rave

Should I continue?

And it wasn’t bad everywhere….

People who live in China thought this was a great decade. A young Chinese couple on NPR were beside themselves because they could afford a T.V.

A T.V.

Perhaps we need to rethink our Decade from Hell. Perhaps we need to look back on what past generations went through, pull ourselves up by our boot straps and refuse to be mired in what is wrong, what is bad. Otherwise we’re just like the big crying baby on the cover of Time…sad, immobile, waiting for someone to come and fix it.

I think that’s selling us a little short.