Well the video starts off qualifying "since the 1990s." To me, the very worst decade ever included gas lines around the block and interest rates at 19%, a president who told us all to wear warmer sweaters and not put up Christmas lights. A decade that also included Watergate and watching helicopters take off from the US Embassy so that our servicemen came home and were treated like dirt, had garbage thrown on them, and were accused of being baby killers. That was far worse than this past decade, far worse.

Oh, and I forgot to mention over 400 days of hostage crisis.

Um... a call from 1935-1945 is holding on the white courtesy phone. And I have here a letter here from some decade in the 13th century (the writing is very old-fashioned and difficult to read but I can make out things about "Mongol hordes" and the Black Plague...)

Andrea:

I think there are 6 million souls and those who survived to become their descendants would agree with you. And you make a good point about 13th. I was going by a decade when I was alive, but their have certainly been much worse.

When I was a child, we lived in terror every Summer that polio would strike us down. When my Mother was a child she lost her younger brother and her mother to the flu pandemic and then saw her whole world collapse around her when the stock market crashed and the Depression set in all in a single decade.

Black plague, meningitis, measles, mumps, cholera, smallpox, having more of chance of dying from sepsis than a mortal combat wound during wars of the past, and on and on. Nothing of this past decade comes close to some of those decades.

Oh my goodness. I took a pain pill and even I am having trouble deciphering what I just wrote with all the typos and misspellings and absent words.

There's no reason to despair about the past. After all, the worst is yet to come.

What can I say? This morning, everyone's right: it has been much worse, and it's going to get much, much worse. The fools, er, guys, at Reason are sounding like clueless prats, er, provincial, today.

Well, we could specify that it's the Worst Decade Ever (of the 21st Century.)

When I'd see people ranting about Bush being the Worst President Ever™, I was always reminded of this sort of lack of historical perspective. I mean, even if I disagreed with him, he did not take a single negative action that was not trumped by some past President, and there were Presidents so completely ineffective that we barely remember they existed.

Or take "the greatest invention of the millennium" lists we were dealing with ten years ago. People who were surveyed came up with "car" or "computer"— yet in terms of value and change, why not go for movable type, or vaccines? Both of those are far greater than the first two, and very likely made them possible.

At any rate, I won't say this last decade is the worst of my lifetime. I'm not going to make a decision along those lines until I'm old and decrepit, and even then I don't think this one will qualify. This decade was actually pretty good to me, though I can see where people have been negatively affected by it.

I don't know about it being the "worst"...but it certainly was the most vapid and vacuous.

Dunno about that. The 70s sucked bad enough to bend light.

"...sucked bad enough to bend light."

LOL! I'm stealing that one...

Me, I've always seen American decades not in strictly chronological terms, but as periods marked by catastrophes or cultural shifts that set the tone for the successive era.

To whit:

* The Twenties started with the Volstead Act
* The Thirties began with the 1929 Stock Market Crash
* The Forties opened at Pearl Harbor
* The Fifties came in with the end of the Korean War
* The Sixties roared out of Dallas' Dealey Plaza
* The Seventies sauntered in when Nixon resigned
* The Eighties arrived with Reagan's election
* The Nineties were birthed with the election of Clinton
* And the Uh-Ohs, as I call them, arose from the dust of the WTC.

Did the Teens fall on us when *The One* was elected? Or is an even bigger disaster waiting to usher in the next "cultural decade"?

@Aquilla: Honesty requires me to tell you that I did not make that one up, although I wish that I had.