Flitting on the Cusp

Well that sucked. The first decade of the 21st century is done, dead, gone. It was a decade when America reconnected with its hopelessness, with a national view that everything was getting worse and worse. Pessimism as American as apple pie. It was a decade so down in the dumps that a complete outsider won the presidency with the flimsiest of campaign promises; HOPE plastered in blinding Helvetica on posters. Is that all it takes now? A hope, a dream of happiness is as close as it gets anymore. At least we can lie to ourselves.
If this decade had a starting point, a place where the sea change occurred and the national tide turned, it would be April 20, 1999. College kids across the country were choking down weed for 4/20, some disgruntled Aryans were probably celebrating Hiter's 110th birthday, and two kids in Colorado walked into their school and killed 13 children and then themselves. Columbine showed us that we were not invincible. The Soviet Union was gone, the economy was booming, but the enemies of the 21st century would not be nations or institutions. Those angry young men in Colorado showed us that the individual was all it took to create chaos, and it was near impossible to stop the individual. Individuals attacked us on September 11, and we responded by going to war with an entire region and religion. There was no precedent for this decade. How do you respond to an enemy that kills itself during its first attack? Who do you vent your frustrations on? Civilians in the desert perhaps. Maybe a monolithic entity like Wall Street. Maybe a black man who is either doing nothing or altering the very fabric of America. I don't know either.
But for god sake it's over, and I am not a historian or a journalist. Those aspects of our decade and our century are only the setting that informs our culture. How we respond to these horrors is (in my mind) the only thing worth mentioning. So here I will discuss the trivial at length. Silly movies and grandiose pop songs, internet culture and must hear music; these are the only things that make history bearable. Stimulus = Response.
Since we have marked another arbitrary year into an arbitrary decade, I believe I will start with some arbitrary lists. Inane categorization that is prolific on sites across the internet. But screw those lists. They're made by someone else, and in the era of individual, the only one I care about is me.