We have told 2009 to go to hell and are now eight days into the new year and the new decade. (Yes, yes, there are those that will tell you the new decade doesn’t begin until the first day of 2011, but I don’t care what “they” say. I firmly believe that when the calendar rolls over from a year that ends in “0” to a year that ends in “1,” then a new decade has begun.) I’m happy to be in a new year and a new decade because it feels like we’re starting fresh. The double-aught years, or whatever you want to call the last ten, had grown stale and were beginning to smell, not a strong, blue-cheese left out in the sun kind of odor, but a subtle, persistent aroma of something foul that you can’t determine the origin of. Understand that I don’t wish time to move faster, because I perceive it to move too quickly already, but I am a man learning to love, and live in, the present and I’ve always looked forward to the future, optimistically assuming that future will always be better, no matter how good today is.
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You know what I never did in the last decade? Sexted. Heck, I’ve never even texted, much less sexted. Quite frankly, I don’t know how to send a text message, and I really don’t give a damn. That makes me sound old, doesn’t it? Don’t give a damn about that either.
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What was the most important thing in the lives of Americans in the first decade of the 21st century? Terrorism? The new Depression? Wars? No. “American Idol.” A show successful beyond belief, more people voted for an American idol in 2006 than in any previous presidential election.
I’m quite proud of the fact that I’ve never spent a minute watching this show. I’ve seen the commercials for it, and I’ve seen clips of it on the “news” (what kind of country are we living in when “American Idol” is news?), and the show appears to be mean spirited in it’s criticisms of the contestants who don’t seem to mind embarrassing themselves on national television.
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I’m no great fan of Barack Obama, but I am glad that George W. Bush is gone. It wasn’t just his mangling of the English language, or his tendency to start wars every once in while. The thing was, I was really getting tired of hearing how Bush stole the election in 2000. I’m from Chicago. Stealing votes is a given. Politicians outside Chicago do it too. If Al Gore hadn’t been such a water-walker and had stolen more votes in Florida than Bush had, Gore would have been president.
I’m surprised the Gore campaign didn’t steal at least a few ballots. Gore’s campaign manager was William Daley, brother of the current mayor of Chicago and son of one of the most famous vote getters of all, Richard J. Daley, who ruled as king of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976. It was under the first Daley’s rule that the deceased of the city acquired voting rights. And the dead always voted for Richard J.
Since Gore ran an honest campaign he slept well at night, knowing there was no wrong doing on his part. At least that’s what a friend of mine told me.
Personally, I doubt Gore slept at all well during most of the Bush administration. Seeing all the weight he put (which he’s recently lost, truth be told), Gore looked like a guy who woke up in the middle of the night feeling tortured and looking for a chocolate cake to inhale. I would too, knowing that if only I had fudged some ballots to win the election there might not have been an Iraq invasion, and there would be no dead American soldiers nor any maimed American soldiers coming home home to a life that would now be drastically different than the one they left behind.
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Speaking of Iraq, we were right to invade. Or at least within our rights. We (and I’m using the royal “we” here, since I personally didn’t do any of this) were wrong to lie about the weapons of mass destruction, we were wrong to change our reasoning for the invasion over the years (first it was to look for WMD, then it was regime change, then it was democracy building), and we wrong to try and fight a war on the cheap. By that I mean, Bush didn’t try too hard to sell the war to Americans because not only did he not care what we thought, he assumed, based on “intelligence,” that the war would be over soon. So we didn’t have the proper armor for our fighting troops and we kept sending National Guard divisions filled with men and women who were better suited to patrol American cities after a hurricane or some other disaster than they were for desert warfare. It was war on the cheap because Bush hadn’t prepared for an elongated stay. He was hoping for Iraqi women throwing roses at American troops as we drove through liberated Baghdad in Humvees, just as the US Army had driven through a liberated Paris in Jeeps in 1944.
But we were within our rights to invade. The UN made Saddam Hussein a deal, and he signed on to it, wherein he was supposed to allow arms inspectors into Iraq, and if he reneged on that deal, which indeed he did when he told the inspectors to get out, than one of the punishments facing him could possibly be his removal from power, by force if necessary. When the UN chose not to remove him, the US was certainly within it’s rights to do what the UN didn’t want to, in order to protect our national security, which we perceived to be threatened. Just turned not be as threatened as Dick Cheney would have us believe.
Still, a dictator, an enemy of the US, is gone. Some Iraqis are happy about that. Some aren’t. Can’t please everybody apparently. And don’t tell me that we broke Iraq, and now we have to fix it. All we did is remove a tyrannic dictator who had no qualms about torturing and/or killing his own people. The trouble in Iraq now is amongst Iraqis. And they are the ones who need to fix it.
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MySpace and Facebook became hugely popular within the last few years. I don’t have a MySpace page or a Facebook page. Being an anonymous, unread blogger seems like enough to me. Having other social media outlets point out how popular I’m not just seems unnecessary to me.
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I don’t know what the next year or the next ten years has in store for me. Anybody who thinks they know the future is delusional. We may think we do, but nothing, and I mean nothing, is guaranteed. Not even if it’s in writing.
I can predict some generalities. There will be loss. There will be tears. There will be times that drive us to distraction and moments of quiet contemplation. There will be resignation on our parts to accept what we cannot change. We will meet challenges. Sometimes we’ll even succeed. There will be laughter. Drinks will be hoisted, and meals consumed. Friends will be made, friends will be lost. Family will gather.
As ever before, life will be lived.
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