The 2000s, the decade from purgatory

In a recent Time magazine column, Andy Serwer labeled the 2000s the “decade from hell.” I’d be more inclined to call it the decade from purgatory.

If you lost a loved one in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, or in the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, or you lost your job or your home, the 2000s were the decade from hell.

As a nation, however, we were stuck in the middle, between heaven and hell — purgatory. The 1990s were heaven. Back then we felt an overwhelming national sense of limitlessness, euphoria even. The Cold War had ended, and America, we believed, had won. Democracy reigned across the former Soviet bloc. Tens of millions of once-oppressed people rejoiced at gaining their freedom from communist rule.

Fueled by the Internet, the U.S. economy was humming, and loads of people were getting rich — at least on paper. Innovation was the big buzzword.

There were portents of troubled times ahead. A handful of terrorist attacks rattled the nation, including one at the World Trade Center in 1993, but the damage was repairable, and we weren’t shaken for long. We believed the terrorist groups to be too small, too ragtag to harm us for real. We were, it seemed, invincible.

The 1930s and 1940s were hell. During the Great Depression, which began in the U.S. in 1929 and lasted through the late 1930s, poverty was widespread, with 25 percent of Americans unemployed. Two-thirds of all international trade stopped. During the 1940s, 16 million Americans went to war fighting Nazism and fascism. Nearly 420,000 of them died in battle, and hundreds of thousands of others were injured. Worldwide, an estimated 60 million people were killed, including 6 million Jews in Hitler’s quest for world domination and 9 million Soviets.