Worst Decade? Give Me A Break

LITTLE ROCK — Worst decade ever,” Time magazine tells us.

Gosh, I’d bet the survivors of the Black Death in medieval Europe or victims of Yellow River flooding in China over the course of centuries might have disagreed.

I’m a history geek. Few things punch my button quite like hysterical announcements of how bad things are. These slogans pitch magazines to baby boomers.

Therefore, they take the view that history didn’t begin until 1946.

Nobody was sold at a slave auction anywhere in the United States in the first decade of the 21st Century, as far as I know. That ought to count for something.

In fact, declaring the decade over is an error too. The 21st century, properly speaking, didn’t start until Jan. 1, 2001. So the first decade won’t end until next year.

OK. I’m being picky. History nerds are like that.

Let’s bend the rules a little bit and look just within living memory. People born in 1914 would be 95 years old. They saw the first World War, the Spanish Influenza pandemic, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of many of their family farms, the Great Depression, the second World War and the Holocaust. They were born into a world where women didn’t have the right to vote and most places were segregated.

It wouldn’t be too much to say that every decade of their lives before 1946 was clearly worse than last 10 years.

I’m not being cold to people who are underwater on their mortgages or who can’t find jobs. I’m saying that if they’re still able to pay their bills and they have running water and electricity in their homes. That alone makes this a better decade than it was for a lot of folks for most of recent history. I’d also point out that there are people in Washington and Benton counties who don’t have reliable running water yet.

I’m really, really disappointed my 401(k) isn’t as hefty as it used to be, but I’m nowhere near ready to start comparing myself to Dust Bowl Okies.

I haven’t traveled around the country that much, but wherever I’ve gone I’ve run into Arkies who left because they couldn’t find a job back home. Things aren’t great now, but now we still have peoplecoming here to find jobs.

A lot of people around here have lost good jobs. Let’s compare that to the whole rest of the country.

Go to cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/ multimediafinal.html. Hit “Play.” Watch just about the whole rest of the country turn purple or black.

They have unemployment rates greater than 7 percent (purple) and 10 percent (black.)

See that little spot of red space around us? That’s Benton, Washington, Carroll, Madison and Franklin counties.

Thirty-one million people in these United States are either out of a job, working part-time bits or have given up looking. That’s more than 10 times the whole population of Arkansas.

This region isn’t what it used to be, but it’s a garden spot compared to the rest of the country.

That’s not much consolation to any family deep in financial crisis, I know. However, there were families who suffered bad times during the height of general prosperity.

Individual tragedy and wide-open generalizations about “Worst Decade” are two different things.

Nobody can deny that the first years of the 21st century were bad. All I’m saying is that we, as a people and as a region, have been through much worse.

DOUG THOMPSON IS EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR.