I’ll never forget where I was when this decade started. I was in my kitchen making my daily ketchup omelet when I felt my iPhone buzz in my pocket, alerting me to a new text message. It was 3 in the afternoon, and I remember smelling and hearing the coffee brewing as I slipped the iPhone from my pocket and seeing the text message from my friend Marty: “Turn on CNN”. Expecting to see a dark New York City illuminated by a bright dropping ball marking the beginning of a new century, I was instead shown images of a bright blue sky and a grey flying saucer. Aliens, I thought. But then I read the caption. So that’s what a balloon boy looks like. He must have been celebrating the new year. He was up there for a long time. The news people didn’t seem to think the boy was having much fun. Then he landed and in seconds the screen was full of official looking cars and SUV’s and a man with a shovel. I imagined the scene wouldn’t have been any different if it was an alien. There were fire trucks, but no fire. The man with the shovel started to try and kill the balloon boy, but failed, because there was no balloon boy. It was all very confusing. How could there be a balloon boy if there was only a balloon?
It was an auspicious start to what would turn out to be an auspicious decade, full of things that had names that hadn’t been named before. Like take the recent presidential election and the introduction of a hanging chad. When I first heard that on the news I thought of my friend Chad, and I called him and asked if he was OK. He said he was fine. I said they are hanging people named Chad you need to leave the country. He didn’t say anything after that. Eventually I said good luck and hung up. Turns out they weren’t killing people but having trouble counting up votes. It was silly really, we had the technology to send robot bugs to Mars but we couldn’t even count up a couple of million votes. I remember feeling giddy when they sorted it all out and we had a new color for our president, and even more new words to say: Death Panels, Mission Accomplished, IED, Flip-Flopper, Ethanol, MP3, Tweet, Pre 9/11.
Of course, 9/11. Before 9/11 we were a country united. We loved our country and embraced our differences. Blue and Red were just blue and red, colors of our common American Flag, displayed everywhere, from houses in the suburbs to apartments in the city. Then 9/11 changed all that. We quickly became cynical and jaded. Our leaders were not to be trusted. We wanted out of Iraq. There was no “Good War” to be won. We resigned to trying to make money in technology stocks, fearful of the fickleness of our recently collapsed real estate markets. Then, if that wasn’t enough, Michael fucking Jackson died. Oh great, we thought while eating yet another ketchup omelet, the King of Pop is dead now. Are you happy? What else, huh? Health Ledger, is that all you got? Oh, your a big man, taking a couple hundred thousand Southern Asians. Fuck you, we thought. Right? What else do you want? Why not take the last Kennedy while your at it? How about another Beatle? Why not castrate Tiger Woods while your at it? Christ!
OK… deep breath.
At least you gave us Obama, and those unlikely heros of music we all watched on YouTube, and LipDubs, and the revival of the Batman movies, and Judd Apatow, and the Iranian protestors. But you took too much. You took people we loved. You took our pets that we loved. You took our money that we earned. But that’s OK, that’s your job. But please, for this new decade, please have some mercy. We don’t know if we can do it again.
