Less than 10 years ago, on Dec. 31, 1999, citizens around the globe worried the world was headed for trouble. Remember?

Government officials and computer scientists around the world held their breath as millions of computers’ ’99s turned to ’00s, fearing a massive millennium meltdown that would throw worldwide banking systems and stock markets amok. In addition, many scared-as-hell Americans rushed to purchase survival kits, toilet paper and even a few bunkers due to expected shutdowns of power plants, cities and the country.

Of course, as we now know, such fears were unfounded. The ball dropped, millions kissed and, aside from a few minor glitches — the most prominent of which was likely the failure of 500 slot machines at a Delaware racetrack — modern technology continued to support the everyday actions that members of today’s civilizations have come to expect.

Yet although Y2K did not bring doomsday, it did bring a whole heap of bad — to the world as a whole, but to the United States in particular. Indeed, the decade that is about to end is not only inarguably the worst decade we young people have lived through (which isn’t saying much), but is perhaps the worst decade our parents and even grandparents have lived through as well (which is saying a lot more).

Such a contention is supported first by the presidential election of 2000. Whether supporting George W. Bush, who garnered 271 electoral votes and 47.9 percent of the popular vote, or Al Gore, who took a respective 266 and 48.4 percent, one has to admit the election — whose winner was eventually decided by the Supreme Court — was an embarrassing fiasco. After calls for a recount of Floridians’ votes, the court ruled 7–2 that although a recount was warranted and could have been carried out if sufficient standards were in place, uniform standards did not exist, and the resulting “arbitrary and disparate” treatment of Americans’ votes would violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. Thus, right or wrong, the decade opened up with nine justices, rather than the American people, electing a president, and that’s a scar on our democracy that may never heal.

So too is the scar on the American psyche that was delivered on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when 19 al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four airplanes, crashing two into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. While they thankfully failed to fly the last plane into, most likely, the Capitol building, 2,976 innocent people were killed in the attacks. This tragedy carried out by gutless martyrs, 9/11 turned out to be the defining moment of the decade.

First, the attacks spurred what is already a nine-year war in Afghanistan — a war that has thus far claimed 932 American lives, billions of dollars and drags on today, our country uselessly working to defeat a now largely-defunct al-Qaida and bring security and democracy to a fully corrupt government. Second, 9/11 was also used as the primary piece of evidence to justify the Iraq War — a seven-year war that, like Afghanistan, claimed 4,367 lives and billions of dollars, but unlike the justifiable war in Afghanistan, was further tinged by the Bush administration’s clear deception of the American people, as well as torture carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Add to these respectively un-winnable and unjustified wars the uneasy future of Iran that has at least partly resulted from a preoccupied U.S., and there’s no arguing that on the global security and military side of things, this had been one ugly decade. 

The economy, which has been the high point of so many American decades, has been unkind as well. Though it may be hard to remember amidst more recent events, Wall Street crashed back in 2000, not long after the NASDAQ hit an all-time high of 5,049. Enron filed for the then-largest bankruptcy in American history in 2001, following the revelation that it had hidden billions in debt from its shareholders.

By the numbers, today’s stock market is down 26 percent since 2000, officially making this the worst decade for stocks. Outside of Wall Street, the median household income fell from $52,500 in 2000 to $50,303 in 2008; Americans living below the poverty line rose from 11.3 percent to 13.2 percent during the same period; and, the current subject of Congress, uninsured Americans rose from 13.7 percent to 15.4 percent. Completing this sad picture of everyday Americans’ economic troubles, the price of oil more than tripled from the start to the end of this decade, now hovering around $70 a barrel.

Of course all of this pales in comparison to the economic misfortune of the last two years. Caused by politicians of both parties and Americans of both Wall Street and Main Street — who all played a part in fueling a huge housing bubble and excessive borrowing — the country hasn’t seen the likes of this recession, or really meltdown, since the Great Depression.

Marked by individuals such as Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff; failed banks such as Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, who demonstrated their greed in piling $30 of debt onto each $1 of capital; bailed-out banks such as [name any major American bank here]; bankrupt automakers such as GM and Chrysler and the uncompromising United Autoworkers Union; government actions such as the humongous American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; and unemployment now hovering around 10 percent, we are unlikely to ever forget the economic demise that is bringing the 2000s toward its close.

Nor will we likely forget the havoc that Mother Nature wreaked on our nation in the 2000s, bringing us countless Western wildfires, devastating Midwestern floods and Hurricane Katrina — the storm that killed an estimated 1,836 people, caused $100 billion in damages, made a mockery of FEMA and was the worst natural disaster in our history.

To close up my case against the 2000s, social problems abounded as well. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of Americans on probation, on parole, in jail or in prison rose from 6.4 million in 2000 to 7.3 million in 2008.

Violent crimes also rose nationwide, the most prominent of which include the murder of 32 students at Virginia Tech in 2007 and last month’s murder of 13 at Fort Hood.

Even America’s game, baseball, lost much of its luster, tainted by the use of steroids by a laundry list of baseball players including Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez. Lastly, television news, while perhaps being offered on more channels than ever before, has also fared poorly over the decade, not only offering partisan fundamentalism but a soft news craze marked by the likes of “Octomom” and “Balloon Boy.”

Although I could go on, my case is made. Considering all these actions and events that have marked the last decade — and I admit, I’ve surely missed many negatives and clearly overlooked positives, the most historical of which is the election of America’s first African-American president — what is about to end could and should be called the Decade from Hell.

Simply put, most Americans cannot honestly say they, or the United States as a whole, are better off today than they were in 2000. Let’s just hope come 2020, they can.

Steve Adams is a graduate student in journalism and mass communication from Annapolis, Md.