2010: The Year in Review

This year we saw a lot of changes... and reasons for hope... Barack Obama was elected president. Michael Jackson died. (Was that just another example of the quirky way the universe balances things out?)

This year marks the end of the decade...

...a decade where television actually became an art form, and the union T.V. writers actually went on strike to prove it.

...a decade where we saw the Internet become a tool for anonymity, then come full circle to become a tool where no one is anonymous, all accounts are consolidated, and everyone knows everything about you-- or if they don't, they have the information at their fingertips, and they most certainly can find out, with a very minor amount of persistence. Now all of our accounts are connected: YouTube, Gmail, Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter... Where does it all end? Do we really need to be this in touch and networked? I am frightened to see how all of this information sharing, "transparency", and "social" networking may backfire. It may happen sooner than later, but for now, I have apprehensively decided to embrace it.

This same decade is the one where we saw eight years of rule by a madman named George W. Bush. Unfortunately, most of this decade will be known for the wars he waged, and the rights he and Dick Cheney decided to take away from the average citizen, under the heading of The Patriot Act. If even the name sounds ominous, that's great, because it should. Privacy and the Bill of Rights, all normal procedure and protocol... abandoned in the name of Nationalism and Patriotism. After all we need protection from "the big bad" which has been marketed this last decade as "The War on Terror". Are there terrorists in the world? YES! Absolutely. I am not denying that fact, or trying to play down the importance of it. (Just the other day we had another attempted terrorist attack on a flight to the U.S. by some nutty radical Nigerian.) I am just admitting that George W. Bush is also a terrorist of sorts, and that we have a lot of blood on our hands as a Nation. It's going to take more than just 8 years of Obama, if we should be that lucky, to wash it off.

But politics aside, what else can I say about the Aught-Naughts? We finally saw the invention of hybrid electric/gas cars, or at least finally saw the popularisation of the idea, and watched it come into the mass-consumer market. There has apparently been quite the conspiracy to keep them off the market and to suppress progress in this field, but despite that, we are seeing the cars rise to popularity at last. Hopefully, their popularity will only grow, as humanity sees the benefits of the invention. If nothing else, if we all began driving them, we would probably see another fall in gas prices eventually, as the demand drops. Of course, the flip side of that coin has people worried about the implications of falling demands for petroleum, since our entire economy seems to be so heavily based on a strong demand for it. Now I find myself talking economics, and this is treading on the fringe of politics again, so I will stop there.

Obviously, a lot more happened in The Aughts, and I can't really begin to even summarize it here in a blog page. But I felt the need to write something about it, before 2010 begins. The writing experience has always been a cathartic one for me, and it almos always feels a bit like self-indulgence... a guilty pleasure, if you will.

Oddly, the movie 2010 was not too far off from what is actually possible now! Hopefully we will see some great new semi-prophetic sci-fi in the decade to follow. I just hope it's not the post-apocolyptic model that slowly becomes reality.