Wave Goodbye to the Decade with No Name

There are two things that I want to say about the decade that is ending.

The first is that the decade sucks. That's really the only word for it. I could go on about all the ways it sucked: the dotcom bubble, USS Cole, 9/11, Afghanistan, anthrax, telecom bubble, Enron, Worldcom, DC beltway sniper, Iraq, space shuttle Columbia, Abu Graib, Katrina, North Korean nuclear tests, Iran, housing and subprime mortgage bubble, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, stock market collapse, H1N1 flu, ….

The second thing about this past decade is that we can’t decide on a name for it. The Nineties, the Eighties, the Seventies, the Sixties, those decades all have names. The Zeros, the Aughts, the Naughts have all been bandied about for this past decade but none of them have stuck. This truly has been a decade with no name.

And why would we want to name something that sucks so badly? To name something is to remember it. Maybe by not naming it we don’t have to remember it.

So let’s hear it for the new decade, the Twenty-Teens. The Twenty-Teens are going to be great. Here are some of my predictions for the Twenty-Teens:

(1) The Dow doubles to 20,000 and the S&P to 3,000 after businesses finally figure out how to make money on the internet. It’s the new economy, stupid. That 2008-2009 financial crisis was the old economy dying.

(2) The first woman President of the United States is elected in 2016, and she will not be Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin.

(3) The Muslim world shuns Al Qaeda as nothing more than a cult, as did the Nigerian banker who turned his son in before the Detroit airplane attack.

(4) Israel and Palestine agree on borders for their separate states, and learn to live together in mutual security and peace. Their 40 years in the wilderness are up, or has it been 60?

(5) North and South Korea reunite, Iran throws off rule by the clerics, Chinese capitalists embrace American-style democracy, Russia joins the European Union, and Hugo Cavez as head of Opec apologizes for global warming. OK, maybe not, but a guy can dream.

Here is the problem, when do the Twenty-Teens actually begin? Do they begin on 1/1/2010 or do they not begin until 1/1/2013? We could be in for 3 more years of suckiness before the greatness of the Twenty-Teens can truly reign.

Or do we call this decade the Twenty-Tens? Damn, this coming decade is going to be hard to name too.