Cabinet Office
The turbulent teens deargdoom57 Flickr.com
ChiralJon
Boaworm
Laura Poitras / Praxis Films
As we stand on the cusp of the 2020s, Ruth Sanderson takes a look back over the last decade.
F
or as long as I can remember, the end of each decade has been waved away with a flourish. Before the fanfare of a new year, columns about the previous 10 years pack our newspapers and magazines; there is always a review of the year on TV. The highs, the lows, the analysis, the reflection. However, here we are, late in 2019, and there hasn’t been the same time-honoured passage for this particular decade. This feels a little
20
Herald December 2019/January 2020
conspicuous. Perhaps it’s too hard? It’s been a difficult decade – even its name has been problematic. Have we been living though the teens? Tweens? Twenty-tens? It seems to have been one tremendous fudge for the past 10 years.
Now more than ever, he asks us to be…his voice in a climate of confusion.
Yet here we are on the eve of the 20s – have any of us really looked back? Perhaps, like me, you are too obsessed with the current political machinations domestically, the unfolding American Trump saga and the alarming climate emergency to really have thought about it. All across the world – populism, far right, far left, super powers, wars and rumours of wars are breaking out like blisters. We wring our hands, decry the craziness of
