Word: 80s
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mean, and they definitively ended with the Pill, J.F.K.'s assassination and the Beatles - just as "the '60s" ended when Americans got tired of being alarmed and hectored, and "the '70s" ended when stimulants became more popular than depressants and AIDS appeared. But in all salient respects, "the '80s" - Reaganism's reshaping of the political economy, the thrall of the PC, the vertiginous rise in the stock market...
...80s spirit endured through the '90s and the 2000s, all the way until the fall of 2008, like an awesome winning streak in Vegas that went on and on and on. American-style capitalism triumphed, and thanks to FedEx and the Web, delayed gratification itself came to seem quaint and unnecessary. So what if every year since the turn of the century the U.S. economy grew more slowly than the global economy? Stuff at Wal-Mart and Costco and money itself stayed supercheap! Even 9/11, which supposedly "changed everything," and the resulting Iraqi debacle came to seem like mere bumps...
...Panic of 2008-09. Those of us old enough to remember life before the 26-year-long spree began will probably spend the rest of our lives dealing with its consequences - in economics, foreign policy, culture, politics, the warp and woof of our daily lives. During the '80s and '90s, we were Wile E. Coyote racing heedlessly across the endless American landscape at maximum speed and then spent the beginning of the 21st century suspended in midair just past the end of the cliff; gravity reasserted itself, and we plummeted...
...multiple phone companies and airlines that arise and disappear as fast as strip-mall stores. Women have come close to achieving real equality; being gay has become astoundingly public and unremarkable. And speaking of shaking off addictions, half again as many of us smoked cigarettes in the early '80s. We watched (and helped) the Soviet Union and its European empire collapse and watched (and helped) China change from a backward, dangerous Orwellian nation into a booming, much less Orwellian member of the global order. During just the past 15 years, we've managed to reduce murders in New York City...
This time around, though, in contrast to the early '80s, it's much clearer from the get-go that one era has ended and a new one is about to begin. A lot of the change will be the result of collective political choices, as we clear away the wreckage, consider the bad habits and ill-advised schemes that got us here and try to refashion our economic and health-care and energy systems accordingly. But at least as much of the new America of the 2010s and beyond will be the result of transformed sensibility, changes in our understanding...