i'm honestly feeling somewhat upbeat - but want to share this anyway"

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-31/worst-decade-ever/

To paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—who is one of the many reasons why the ‘00s were a long, hard slog—the ‘00s were “a long, hard slog.” From the unfathomable atrocity of the 9/11 attacks to the unfathomable atrocity of Twilight, from George W. Bush’s half-assed Iraq invasion to Paris Hilton’s half-assed Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose, from the sanctimonious bull of the Taliban to the sanctimonious bull of Eating Animals (HEMINGWAY WOULD NOT APPROVE, JONATHAN), this Wretched Temporal Vacuum of Soul Death known as the Aughts devoured every possible speck of human joy; I visited the 21st century and all I got was this lousy collapse of the world economy.

We have collectively endured—nay, survived—a dark, traumatizing era of Torture and Propaganda and Fundamentalism and Paranoia and Havoc and Facial Stubble and Star Wars prequels that robbed young people of what should have been the best years of our lives. Everything in the past 10 years was a complete disappointment: Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer croaked while Carlos Mencia and Glenn Beck continued to breathe; Hunter S. Thompson and David Foster Wallace killed themselves when Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore should have (They both deserve hospitalization for heart a