By Steven Chen
<[email protected]>

We have just left a decade without a definite name to refer back to.  In 1963, a New Yorker writer with sure prescience suggested “Twenty oh-oh,” “a nervous name for what is sure to be a nervous year.” One appropriate name for the 2010s was the product of the Australian Web site News.com.au. The winner suggested “One-ders” and received $2,010. Judges said that the moniker’s “bright-eyed optimism” was a welcome change.

The past decade was certainly a tumultuous one.  TIME Magazine defined it as the “The Decade from Hell,” facing a Y2K hysteria of the world ending and the 9/11 terrorist attacks within the first two years. 

As the world entered the new millennium, people did not know what they would expect, and as the world left the 2000s, people could not have expected all the calamities that the media has reported. Examples include the still lingering “Great Recession,” peaking gas prices, public shootings, national disasters, two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a flu epidemic.

So where does that leave us, the generation that has defined and been defined by the past decade?

The past cannot be changed and the future cannot be predicted. We, however, can manipulate the present as we want. But we must change our mindsets and start with a tabula rasa, or “clean slate” as philosopher John Locke said. The mindset must be filled with optimism and a cautiousness for the present becomes the past and the future becomes the present.

Clearly, the negatives of the past decade permeated our lives, and while the positives may be easy to forget, we, as a collective whole, must embrace the future with optimism as our guiding light. The positives yet to come should be wholeheartedly received and the negatives brushed aside.

The world did not end on Jan. 1, 2000, and we should certainly not plan for it to end on Dec. 21, 2012, as the Mayans predicted. We do not want to make the same mistake we did 10 years ago. We must learn from them and use them to our advantage.

The first month has been filled with events that marked the major events of the last decade. They have been strikingly similar yet different in the aspect that we have adapted to cope with them.

 A failed Christmas day bomb attempt on a flight to Detroit proved to be a close call and evoked the not-so-distant memory of 9/11. The earthquake in Haiti serves as a reminder for the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. However, we can see differences in people’s reactions to them. The American people have taken a faster call to action to aid others in times of need.

The decade of 2010 is and will be our generation’s decade – the decade when we go to college, graduate and enter the work force. It will be up to us, then, to define how this decade should be defined or be defined by it as the 2000s have done.