Oh, what a decade

LITTLE ROCK — Looking back, the Y2K concerns in late 1999 seem so quaint.

From the collapse of skyscrapers to the collapse of Wall Street, the decade that ends this week was one of the most tumultuous in memory.

Ten years ago, few Americans knew the name Osama bin Laden. Today, he influences how your tax dollars are spent and how you are screened at airports. At the start of the decade, Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube didn’t exist. Now, hundreds of millions of people communicate on them daily.

From Washington to state capitals to Wall Street, corruption and fraud dominated the decade.

As the decade ends, crashes in the housing and stock markets coupled with the Great Recession have left many people facing a lower standard of living. Spiraling government debt threatens to burden the overall economy for decades to come.

George W. Bush was in office eight months when the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by suicidal Muslim extremists from bin Laden’s network. The devastation at the World Trade Center in New York, at the Pentagon in Washington, and in a Pennsylvania field killed nearly 3,000 people.

The federal government greatly expanded its surveillance powers after 9/11. The U.S. military invaded Afghanistan, where the attack originated, and Iraq, which had no link to the al-Qaida plot. The wars have cost more than $945 billion, and more than 5,300 U.S. military personnel have been killed. More than 35,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded. Thousands of military families and their extended relatives have paid a heavy price in many ways.

The response to terrorism ignited an ongoing debate about whether the United States could sidestep the Constitution in the name of national security. The Bush administration held suspected terrorists at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo, Cuba, for years without trial or charges. The Supreme Court ruled that detainees can challenge their indefinite imprisonment in U.S. civilian courts. Revelations of waterboarding and other torture caused the United States to lose some of its moral force internationally in the war against terrorism.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, killing well over 1,000, and raised questions about the government’s competence to respond to such disasters.

The 2008 presidential race became a referendum on these issues. It resulted in an event many people never expected to live to see-Barack Obama being elected as the nation’s first black president.

Financial concerns also persist at the national level as the decade comes to a close. The recession that began in late 2007 grew worse as Wall Street imploded in a series of banking scandals. Venerable investment houses such as Lehman Brothers went belly up, and huge bailouts multiplied. The federal government ended up owning General Motors.

All unthinkable 10 years ago. As the old decade draws to an end, it leaves us with innumerable challenges for the next one.