So long, first decade of the 21st Century.
We can only go up from here. Right?
Time Magazine put it well in its recent cover story featuring a screaming baby on New Year’s.
Do you remember the ever-so-hopeful, worldwide fireworks which ushered in the Year 2000? Could you even conceive of the technicolor waves of calamity that would soon wash across the land? Do you remember….
The tech stock bubble of 2000-01.
Bush-Gore, hanging chads and an election that would not end.
Enron.
9-11.
Anthrax.
Iraq and weapons of mass destruction still not found.
Afghanistan.
The 2004 tsunami.
Hurricane Katrina.
The Washington, D.C. sniper, the Virginia Tech massacre, and the rest of the daily mayhem that makes it possible for Nancy Grace to have a TV show.
Bear Stearns, the housing bubble, and the near-depression of 2008-09.
Or, in thinking more locally…
The decade of partisan paralysis in Lansing.
Kwame.
The GM and Chrysler bankruptcies.
The exodus of Comerica, Bo Schembechler, and Curtis Granderson.
The exodus from breathtaking swaths of Detroit.
And, yet, as a nation, and as a state, we are still standing. We are perhaps even turning a corner. In Michigan, our citizens are more concerned and involved than they were in the go-go 1990s. Our state economy is painfully becoming more diverse, if still struggling, inevitably, under the weight of the Big Three crash. Unemployment in the past reached near-desperation levels. Our state’s large foundations, built on the economic prowess of an age long gone, are more engaged than perhaps ever before in Michigan’s rebuilding process.
We’re leaner, out of necessity. And perhaps a step quicker as a result.
Goodbye, 2000s. Hello, 2010s.
We’re ready for the upswing. Right?
2 Comments
I wish to correct one thing. WMD was found in Iraq in case you did not know. 550 metric tons of yellow cake uranium was found. Iraq did not want to keep it, so it was sold and shipped to Canada for its nuclear fuel program. I estimated that 550 metric tons processed would make about 16,000 Hiroshima type A-bombs using U235. Saddam Hussein only needed to be left alone and produce 1-10 bombs, and deliver a couple to America.
I think of Ray Kennel an an old marine that I worked with. One of his favorite saying was (when all is said and done more is said than done)It is very important to plan for most things and hopefully we will be able to get people to work to accomplish some of them. I know we have the ability but do we have the desire to work for a little less so as to have a future for our grandchildren.
Remember the guy that statement was (ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country?)I think that time has arrived.
Dale Westrick