Maybe there was something to that whole Y2K panic after all.
There were warnings our wired world would crash the moment we flipped from 1999 to 2000. “It didn’t happen at the stroke of midnight, as the Y2K alarmists feared,” Alan Murray noted in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. But soon after “the millennium turned, reality set in,” he said.
The market plunged when the Internet bubble burst in early 2000, and this ended up being the worst decade ever for U.S. stocks. In 2001, there was 9/11, followed by two wars, recession, corruption, scandal, natural and man-made disasters, political polarization and the proliferation of reality TV. As Michael Hirschorn portrayed it in “The 00’s Issue” of New York Magazine, this was a decade in which it seemed no one was in charge — when the bottom fell out of just about everything. Or, as the cover of Time magazine described it: The Decade From Hell.
A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll quantified the general sense of gloom about the ’00s. Nearly 6 in 10 people surveyed said the decade was either “awful” or “not so good.” Only 12 percent rated it “good” or “great.” The rest picked “fair.”
Three-quarters said economic prosperity declined, and two-thirds said America lost ground on moral values during the decade.
A Pew Research poll came up with similar results — and didn’t find a whole lot of nostalgia for recent decades, either.
There were a few bright spots in the NBC/WSJ survey. Nearly half of those polled said we’ve made advances in science and technology. Take the Internet, for example. In 2000, high-speed access was a rarity. Now, it’s the norm. AOL itself went through revolutionary changes. Sphere is the next generation of AOL News, debuting just in time for the end of the decade.
But is this really the end? After a decade marked by discord, people can’t even agree on when it’s over. One camp says it’s the end of this year. The other insists it’s not until Dec. 31, 2010. If that’s true, it could mean another year like the ones we’ve just lived through. (Not to mention another round of wacky “decade lists.”)
Judging from the poll results, most of us can do without one more year of the ’00s.
Check out artical and poll here.
