Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Our Finest Hour

This has been a rough decade, no doubt. But I don't buy the idea that it was the decade from Hell (and you all know who's fault it is!).

We've also done a lot to begin beating back the forces of evil that have made this decade such a challenge:

There’s probably no dissuading those wedded to the easy, pat summary — “the decade was misery, and it’s all Bush’s fault” — but for those willing to look a little deeper, the past ten years were not a period of unremitting gloom. The decade began, in earnest, with an unimaginably evil act of mass murder, and followed with a sometimes messy but much-needed pushback from the forces of civilization and justice.

We tried to take a holiday from history when we won the Cold War. And we did. And the world mostly let us take that holiday. Until September 11, 2001.

We remembered that history doesn't end. And challenges always arise that we must face to build our future. And in this decade, despite the handicaps of trying to fight with one hand tied behind our back, we've risen to the challenge of Islamo-fascism. A generation that many thought was too soft to fight a war, has shown that it can teach the Greatest Generation a thing or two about steadfastness and courage in the face of evil.

We may one day look back at this decade and conclude that it was our finest hour.

UPDATE: Why wouldn't the media hate this decade? They are almost all uniformly liberal and their industry is imploding. Perhaps if they'd done more "reporting" and less "analysis" during the decade about events, the latter problem might not be as acute.

Oh, and yes the decade does end tonight. I don't care that our first decade A.D. started with the year "1" rather than "0." Are we to perpetuate that mistake for two thousand years rather than just say the first "decade" lasted nine years and correct the calendar with the perfectly logical notion that the calendar rolls over when the last digit goes from nine to zero? Come on! Tell me you don't say your odometer rolled over when you hit 100,000 rather than waiting until 100,001.

UPDATE: Well, I may not agree with all the things they think of as positive things, but at least the Christian Scienc Monitor isn't wallowing in giddy declinism.