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Analysis Of The Decade From Hell

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The Decade From Hell: Terrorism, War, and Recession in the 2000s At the end of 2009, Time Magazine controversially named 2000-2009 “The Decade from Hell,” citing numerous factors which had contributed to the breakdown of the idyllic view that Americans and many others had previously held of the United States (TIME, 2009). Factors cited included the contested results of the 2000 election, the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks on the twin towers, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, Detroit’s collapse, and revelations about human rights violations at the military base in Guantanamo Bay. It wasn’t all negative, however. Technology continued to advance rapidly, with smartphones gaining popularity and social media becoming prevalent in the mid-2000s (Dreier, 2015). In 2008, the U.S. made a huge step forward for civil rights, with Barack Obama becoming the first African-American president (and the first president with Muslim roots). Closing out the decade, “The Miracle on The Hudson” brought a lot of people new hope when a pilot managed to save every passenger on US Airways Flight 1549, which seemed doomed following a double engine failure. The political atmosphere in the early 2000’s was significantly different than that of the Obama years, and thus it is impossible to choose a song that accurately represents the entire decade. The Bush era was marked by a notable anti-war sentiment, which is voiced in Eminem’s 2004 single “Mosh” (Plumer,

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