From the Outpost Exchange editor

The end of the decade really snuck up on me. It wasn’t until I began noticing all of the “best of the decade” stories in the media in mid-December that I realized we were facing the end of the naughts.
I know life just continues to accelerate as we age, but this is alarming. Have we really reached the end of a decade already? The beginning of the decade seems so distant now.

The end of the last millennium was marked by widespread worries that the advanced, tech-heavy world we had built would collapse, that computer chips large and small would fail at the stroke of midnight, Y2K.

I can remember that night, waiting for news from around the world, in countries that reached midnight before us, to see if things continued to run, if toasters, water utilities, power grids and alarm clocks kept working.

And I remember serious discussions for months leading up to that night, about what neighborhoods and families and businesses should do to weather the possible meltdown — stock up on water and canned foods, form block organizations so neighbors could help neighbors and the like.

The toasters kept running. The lights stayed on. In hindsight, the worries seemed unwarranted and the huge specter that had been Y2K quickly faded. Perhaps what we took away from Y2K was that even the largest, most publicized problems weren’t really worth the worry, that they would soon drop from radar screen. Ebola? No biggie. Bird flu? Nah. Climate change? Fodder for late night TV monologues. Swine flu? Piece of cake.

We just don’t seem to get too worked up about most things. Of course, 9/11 rattled us in the US like little else in our history, save perhaps Pearl Harbor. But while we continue to fight two wars in the aftermath of that attack, we don’t seem to spend much time thinking about that here at home.
Nor does the urgency of climate change have much of an impact, really, in our daily lives. In homes across the country, we’ve switched light bulbs, tried to bring our own bags to the grocery store and considered buying a hybrid, but mostly we go about our lives much as we always have.

So, here before us is a new decade. And though it is not as auspicious or as portentous as a whole new millennium, it requires even more of us. Perhaps the Y2K bug was a sort of snooze alarm. It’s now time to wake up and shake off the hangover.

Our economic system is in chaos. Top researchers maintain we have a very short window to prevent global climate catastrophe. Our food system is top heavy, inefficient and largely devoted to “foods” and practices that aren’t sustainable. We have hungry, cold and sick among us — we can see them from the windows of our SUVs.

We don’t need to work for change — it is inevitable. But we do need to work — together — to create the changes we want.