Coming of age in the Noughties

By Tim Nicholls / @tim_nicholls

Blog reviews of the decade seem in vogue this week and those I have read, including Julian Ware-Lane’s on this site, have got me thinking. This is the decade in which I have come of age politically, but it’s been a tale of two very different decades: one of hope and one of cynicism and, all too often, fear.

I saw the beginning of it through the eyes of a 13 year-old, perhaps naively, full of hope for the years to come. And when I thought through all the things that have happened over the last ten years, what surprised me is that I am still going into the twenty-teens hopeful.

I remember thinking at the beginning that there was a lot of hope for the future. The world was at relative peace, development was high on the agenda internationally, and the global community seemed finally to be waking up to the need for multilateral action to stop genocide.

But things have changed. For people my age, the moment that we all grew up politically was the same moment that changed everything. Every generation will have one: people a decade older will remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and remember knowing there and then that the world had changed in an instant. For my generation, we will look back on the events of 11 September 2001 with the same knowledge, but much heavier hearts. It’s the first time we had experienced something of this magnitude and, for me and many others, it framed the coming years.

The tone of politics changed, first to fear, then to anger and then, on some levels, to retribution. Globally, things were done and decisions made that many people, including me, thought were not right, in the name of national security. I am beginning to think that this tone is changing back again, but it needs to change more.

There were subsequent events that dragged the tone of this past decade towards the negative, all over the world. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the expenses scandal, the global recession. But (and this is the reason for my hope for the next decade), these have also pushed us to demand that the next decade has to be different. No more business as usual.

We can sit and argue about change up to the election, but that will mean nothing if we don’t keep up the pressure (whoever wins). After the past decade of ups and downs, I can’t help but feel that we are standing at a point from where we can make change happen. Out of the ashes of the lost respect in governments and financial institutions across the world, maybe we can make something better; learn from the past.

When Paine wrote, about the late eighteenth century, that, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” I wonder if he thought that it would ever not be so. Our souls and consciences are tried daily, but we are standing on the edge of a decade in which things could change for the better, if we make it. The last decade has been a hell of a decade, but I’m still looking forward to the next one.