The Abortion
January 30, 2009
Progressives called the 1980s the “decade of greed.” Conservatives called the 1990s a “holiday from history.” I’d like to suggest a fitting title for the 2000s: “The Nasty Decade.”
Seriously, did anything go right the last ten years? Could you have imagined things being this insane on December 31, 1999? Maybe this was the Y2K problem everyone feared.
We’ve had three consecutive controversial elections, a terrorist attack that ended the lives of nearly 3,000 individuals, and an economic crisis that brought the world to its knees. The country’s morale sinks while the national debt rises. Like ungrateful children, this decade has been good for nothing.
I’d hate to be a child growing up these last ten years. Any young person who has borne witness to the horrors of this decade will be mentally scarred for life. He or she will grow up cynical, confused, uncertain about the prospect of happiness in the future. Those who opened the cruel gifts life delivered over the past decade have learned not to trust the government, not to trust the media, not to trust authority—not to trust anybody.
We will look back at the 2000s and remember this decade as the one in which we became pregnant with cynicism and sparked a baby boom. We will remember the exact moment in this decade when we became permanently bitter and alienated, silently contemptuous of what passes for daily existence.
Speaking of pregnancy, I sometimes wonder about my friends from high school and college who describe the joys of parenthood on their Facebook pages. I’m happy for them, but I can’t help thinking that in this era, one has to be a little bit crazy to become a parent. Why would someone want to bring life into a world filled with so much death?
I think about the folks who brought children into the world decades ago, only to see those children taken from them through acts of religious extremism and war. I think about how their minds must now be filled to capacity with bitterness and anger and hatred of life and hatred of God, and I wonder if the same fate will befall my friends someday.
Whether prompted by the violence of 9/11 or the tides of Katrina or the IEDs of Baghdad, one can’t be surprised by a growing lack of faith in the American populace. An atheist desirous of turning people against God couldn’t have designed the events of this decade any better in terms of trying to accomplish that result. Or maybe atheism has nothing to do with it: perhaps the events of this decade were the acts of a God who decided to answer the paranoid prayer of President Obama’s former pastor and damn America.
Maybe Jeremiah Wright was right. Maybe America’s chickens are indeed coming home to roost. Maybe this decade has been punishment for our past greed, our past iniquity, our past idiocy. Remember Robert Bork’s book Slouching Towards Gomorrah? Maybe we became Gomorrah.
I don’t mean this in a right-wing sense. We didn’t become Gomorrah only by allowing our culture to become coarser: we also become Gomorrah by doing little to address the problem of middle-class wage stagnation. Those of us who accept the “conservative” label also bear responsibility for the apparent judgment of our country: while we rushed to protect the life of Terri Schiavo, how many of us raised questions about the ineptitude that led to the needless and senseless deaths of so many American soldiers in Iraq between 2004 and the 2007 troop surge? Were we only pro-life when it came to middle-class women in Florida?
This was the decade when great men left us (Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley) and mediocre men replaced them. This was the decade when the “dumbing down of America” reached its zenith, a decade when we decided that the cheap and tawdry had character and taste. This was the decade of American Idol and minds that were idle. This was the decade of actions that shocked the conscience, and actions of those with no conscience.
The birds flew into our engines this decade, but there was no hero captain to save us once the plane crashed. If we survived, it was only because of a fluke. Flukes defined this misbegotten, star-crossed decade. Were it not for the Lewinsky and Elian Gonzalez scandals, would George W. Bush have become President? Were it not for Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Margaret Marshall and the release of The Passion of the Christ, would Bush have retained his seat? Were it not for an economic collapse and unchecked GOP arrogance, would Obama have made history?
The answer is the same as the answer to this question: Will anyone remember this decade with anything approaching fondness?
