The Naughty Aughties?

Well, the Aughties are over.  And we're back to having 10 year decades, 100 year centuries, etc. (as opposed to the 9-year nineties and 99-year 20th century).

But were the Aughties naughty like their predecessor (1901-1910)?  Not really.  That decade was naughty in the social sense of emerging from the Victorian era and letting it all hang ("Relatively") out.  There were no great wars, at least as far as Western Europe and the U.S. were concerned (unlike a century earlier when all of Europe was in turmoil), and by all accounts it was a golden age, assuming you had money to enjoy it.  The horrors of WWI and WWII were unimaginable at that point in time and they knew nothing about global warming or the finiteness of oil, which they had just begun to pump out of the ground in places like Azerbaijan.

Our Aughties were naughty in other ways.  First, we had those extremely naughty people flying planes into our great buildings.  Then we had those naughty Republicans using that attack as a smokescreen to further enrich themselves by invading Iraq.  And throughout, we've all been very naughty by continuing to waste our dwindling supplies of fossil fuels and doing absolutely nothing about it.

As a result, we may have witnessed the very last Aughties, at least in the sense of a reasonably civilized world where our coastal cities are dry and intact.  I'm skeptical that the World is going to end at the winter solstice of 2012 as suggested (through omission) by the Mayans et al, and more recently by Hollywood.  But I'm afraid it's going to become an increasingly scary place as people compete for (dry) land and resources.  I sincerely hope that by the year 2100, we are all* living comfortably in our solar-energy-based economy with the polar ice and sea levels re-established.  But I'm doubtful.  See the works of people like Daniel Quinn and Jared Diamond, etc. etc.

* anywhere between 6 and 14 billion of us.