Decade 1

[in_parentheses]

I just watched the Y2K episode of Sports Night, in which Jeremy claims that the complete system failure during his Y2K test is "a metaphor for the new millenium

Comments

[imminently]

Black president. BLACK PRESIDENT!
Woman Speaker of the House of Representatives (and another woman was a legitimate candidate for the presidency)
Gardacil approved and sold
The Lord of the Rings movies
First black and first woman president of an Ivy league university
The price of computers is waaaaaaay down (and way smaller)
The iPod was invented
The West Wing
Nearly everyone, everywhere is living longer
Al Gore changing the way everyone thinks about climate change
Rise of locavorism, and happy meat
Pretty much everything except for housing getting cheaper (in constant dollars)
The Internet got waaay better (Youtube, gmail, rss, web comics)
High Definition TVs
Rapid improvement in the Human Development Index pretty much everywhere
Mapping the human genome, personalized genetic tests
Birth control ring
Improvements in health: 40% fewer deaths from heart disease, living so much longer with AIDS that we worry about problems of living with AIDS, fMRI

[tahnan]

I'd feel better about a lot of these things if they felt, I don't know, more deep and less, I don't know, cosmetic. I'm reminded of the line from comedian Bill Santiago that one black president doesn't counter 43 white presidents. Now, 43 white presidents in a row, that might count for something ("And even if we get to 42, if one white guy gets elected, we have to start all over

[imminently]

You wouldn't? I'm sorry Obama hasn't achieved everything we wanted him to achieve in his first 9 months in office (and btw, Don't Ask, Don't Tell would require congressional approval) but the election of our first black president is inherently a good thing, almost regardless of what he does in office. Same with having the second most powerful government official in the country be a woman. These are barrier-breaking events, regardless of the individual.

Also, I'm going to stand by the growth in average lifespan, HDI, the HPV vaccine and the reduction in heart disease as Good Things. And iPods. iPods are awesome.

[tahnan]

Obama hasn't achieved anything we wanted him to achieve (and while rescinding Don't Ask Don't Tell might require congressional approval, he hasn't taken any steps at all in that direction, and there's a lot he could do unilaterally). And barrier-breaking events could, I suppose, be considered good things, but not if the barrier is then rebuilt right behind the breaker.

The other things might in fact be good. Except iPods. iPods are awesome if you can afford them, perhaps.

[cnoocy]

I think even the bad things have some seeds of good in them. 10 years ago, we didn't even notice when a movie or TV show portrayed torture as an effective means for extracting information. That's not a mainstream criticism now, but I see it more often and I suspect it has less than 10 years left.
We're seeing some movement on a national train system.

There's little things like this. We shouldn't focus only on the good, but seeing only the bad is a betrayal of the good in the same way. I know people (including myself) who have had great things happen to them this decade, and I'd be really wary about trading those for anything.

[mrmorse]

I have another two thoughts, or maybe a thought and a half.

From the perspective of people who want to change the world, success is almost always partial. Things don't change fast enough, or they don't change enough, or things that looked like big changes have smaller impacts than expected. If you're unwilling to count the partial victories as the victories they are, you will naturally view politics as a long string of failures, even if things are continuously improving. Celebrate the successes, even when they are partial, and keep moving to build on them.

I wasn't really aware enough in 1989 to ask whether the 80s were a good decade or not. But lately I've been listening to a lot of deeply paranoid music that is either from the 80s or reflects the 80s. A short list includes Kraftwerk (really from the 70s, but in the same psychic space), Big Science by Laurie Anderson, Koyaanisqatsi and its sequels, and the opera Doctor Atomic, which was written in 2005 about the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, but evokes for me

[ex_colorwhe]

the actress in my icon, beah richards, says a favorite quote of mine in an episode of designing women: "We ain't what we should be. We ain't what we're gonna be. But at least we ain't what we was."

[martini_corona]

I would echo Mr. imminently on Gardasil. As for the rest of it, I moved from a Charlottesville liberal bubble to a Providence liberal bubble to a Somerville liberal bubble, so YMMV, but:

- curbside recycling
- ability (using the internets) to find other types of recycling, freecycling, etc. should you so need them. (Did you know the Walgreens on Beacon St. recycles plastic bags? I just realized that this morning.)
- mobile phone networks in developing countries that bypass land-line infrastructure
- I see a LOT of biracial babies on my Facebook feed. More than having a black President, this makes me optimistic about race relations in the U.S. Now, granted, in the mid '90s there were a good number of interracial relationships in my high school (not a huge number, but a solid handful), but I think there's been progress towards normalizing this. Not that I am helping. :p
- $10 bus rides from Boston to NYC