Let's all put on our nostalgia goggles and go back to a much more naive, optimistic time: 2000. Remember the year 2000? How we were all excited about all the cool stuff that the future would bring?

Well, it's been a decade or so, and now we're looking at entering 2010. If that doesn't immediately blow your mind, I don't know what will. The future is here, and it's nothing like we imagined it.

Some readers might remember this Superbowl commercial from 2000. I'd say it's funny how wrong it ended up being, but really, there's nothing funny about it at all. We were so bright-eyed about the future, and then the future ended up sucking.



So again, here we are: less than seven days away from the year 2010. We're at war overseas. Americans are dying from malnutrition, poverty and a lack of medical care. Virtually everybody's broke, and the people with money are one bad decision away from being broke too. I know what you're thinking, and no, robbing a bank and dying in a suicidal blaze of glory isn't the answer. We do need to make some commitments to the future, though. I've drafted a pretty solid three step plan for the upcoming decade.

1. Quit being a dick, everybody. I think the current trend over this decade was the 'Yeah, screw you, buddy' mentality that pervaded everything from work and business, to our culture, to even our politics. We did, and are still doing, some messed up stuff, America (don't click this link). Remember when being an American didn't have this massive screwed-up cultural cache attached to it? Yeah, the idea of American exceptionalism is unrealistic and outdated, but there was a period when we believed it, and we made some relatively good decisions. We need more of those! Less blowing stuff up! And don't get me started on each of us personally. You don't need to look much further than the comment section of any online newspaper or blog to see that as people, we're pretty awful. We somehow managed to elect a black guy to the office of President, and then watch as a large portion of crazies hurls racial slurs at him. What the crap, guys? Makes you wish we were back in the day, when disrespecting the President meant that he made a trip to your house and punched you in the nose. Give 'em hell, President Jackson! And the rising murder rates! Why, the last few weeks there have been three murder/suicides here in Utah where the father has murdered his family and then killed himself. That's messed up.
   
2. Stop messing with the planet, guys! If we're talking about bioengineering terror lizards to crush our foes, maybe, because that's pretty cool. Let's cut back on the whole 'screwing everything else up' plan. Like, let's stop cutting down rainforests, and causing global warming and stuff. I don't care if you think global warming is a manufactured controversy or not -- we should probably not be strip mining and exploiting the whole planet. Fifty years ago popular notion held that if we messed up Earth, we could just go to some other planet and start messin' it up. Considering that we don't even have jetpacks yet, I'm going to say that the 'colonize and exploit' option is off the table. So lets start taking care of what we have. 
3. Let's change our priorities. Right now, as of this second, we've spent $712,823,638,283 waging war in Iraq. According to a recent study, that amount of money could have given everyone on the planet clean drinking water about 200 times over. Or, ooh, we could have dumped even a billion of that money into our schools and overhauled the educational system! We could have fed the poor, or worked towards AIDS/cancer cures. But nope, we used that to blow stuff up and make the middle east a little bit worse. Can we refocus our priorities over the next decade? Emphasize stuff like peace, and science, rather than war and destruction.

Ten years from now, I want to be able to say, Man, 2000 - 2009 sucked. Glad we didn't do that again.

Also, a jetpack wouldn't hurt, guys.

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