The NYTimes looks at naming the ’00s. I like this guy, science fiction writer David Brin:
“I would recommend the Noughty-aughts,” he said. “ ‘Nought’ as in zero. ‘Aught’ as in nothing. Both words contain essentially nothing, because this was an era when no progress was made.”
Mr. Brin looks at the ’00s as a great lost opportunity, the decade when “the drug high of self-righteousness poisoned our inherent American joy in pragmatic problem solving.” We missed the chance to solve the problem of global warming, to fix our crumbling infrastructure, to find ways for the United States to become a font of new products for the entire world.
Instead, he says, we were sidetracked by our response to 9/11, which he considers stupid and costly. Ever since the decade began, “it’s been whining and crying and moaning, and retreat from ambition,” he says. “On the grand scale of things, our descendants will look at us as a bunch of crybabies.”