It is hard to believe and yet all too believable that another decade is already wrapping up. It has been a strange one. While it lacked the overt chaos of 9/11 and the onset of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and acute fears of terrorism, it brought its own unsettling dynamics and sense of dread.
The rise of social media via the internet was perhaps the most dramatic phenomenon that affected society, with spidery tendrils of downstream effects, most dramatically including contributing to our presidential election winners: the initial audacity of hope and embrace of multiculturalism and globalism provided by President Obama, and the crashing “whitelash” and isolationism of President Trump. The galloping continuous rise of the stock market after the 2008 recession, with internet moguls like Amazon and Facebook and Google leading to an unprecedented hoarding of wealth in a handful of people combined with the economic rise of China and India and other countries; this has led a corporate-driven trend towards dangerous deregulation and ethical indifference as fake news goes viral and climate change worsens