Times are good. The past decade has been a time of relative peace and moderate prosperity for the United States.

Never would have thought the Cold War would end so quickly and with relative calm. Glad the Russians were ready to give peace a chance after all that happened between us this past century. Shame that their country is in shambles at the moment, hope this doesn’t come back to bite us in the ass.

As for wars, the decade kicked off with some guy named Saddam (I think) in a nation called Iraq invading a smaller nation called Kuwait in the summer of 1990. The world was not happy about this, and a whole heap of them joined together to bring his army to heel. He didn’t back down, and a good deal of us expected something akin to Vietnam but in a desert, but Operation Desert Storm took only 2 months to complete. The guy had one of the largest armies in the world and the ground war only took 5 days before then-President Bush called a ceasefire. Kuwait got freed, our boys whooped a dictator, the whole thing brought the world closer together, all in all it was a positive experience as far as wars go.

At home not much happened except for some crazies doing bad things. Down in Waco, Texas some cult was in a standoff with the FBI, they set their building on fire and a bunch of children got killed. Then in Oklahoma City there was a guy who detonated a massive bomb and killed hundreds. In New York City another bomb went off at the World Trade Center. I hope these terrorists don’t become a massive problem in the future.

On a lighter note it seems that hip-hop really took off in recent years, and while it’s not my preferred genre there are a few songs I quite enjoy. Expanding on media and leisure the amount of really good movies and shows seems to have diminished somewhat, but Band of Brothers was excellent. What has been a pleasant surprise however has been the realm of video games, with there being so many good ones created in the past decade and their variety of genres is astounding. Some have gotten to the level of movies in terms of cinematics, the progression of the graphics of 3D games have me excited for the future, and the music has been top notch as well.

In regards to technology, there’s this new thing called the World Wide Web and it presents a fascinating new way to share information and communicate over vast distances using interactive visual media. I’m eager to see what becomes of it in the following decades as new services are created pertaining to it and institutions become more savvy with it.

All in all, looking forward to this new millennia with hope for the future.