As the clock struck midnight, fireworks ushered in the new millennium for America.
Finally, the first decade of the 21st century would prove to be the most transformational
since the decade of the 1860s, the decade of the American Civil War.
The first 10 years of the 21st century were ones of great tragedy that saw America attacked
by Islamic terrorists, a preemptive war that turned into a quagmire, the destruction of
a major American city by the forces of nature, and a crippling recession.
But those 10 years were also ones of great triumph, the cracking of the human genetic
code, the bringing together of Americans through the Internet, putting the world's knowledge
at everyone's fingertips, and the election of a black president.
When Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans on August 29th, 2005, it tore apart
the city, smashed levees and flooded neighborhoods.
And when it was over, it left 2,000 people dead and over 200,000 homeless.
The tragic episode revealed a crippling flaw in America's infrastructure and preparedness
to deal with a major disaster.
As the hurricane approached, the whole nation watched as government at all levels, including
city, state and federal, appeared incapable of dealing with any phase of the disaster.
The failure was symbolized when President George Bush complimented the Director of FEMA
for a great job, when just the opposite was true.
And Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.
The FEMA Director is working 24.
People at that very moment were dying because of lack of appropriate action.
This lack of governmental coordination and preparedness shocked the nation.
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, actions have been taken to put new
plans into place to deal with disasters.
The cost to restore the crescent city, the Big Easy, exceeded $9 billion to rebuild
the levees.
However, the New Orleans disaster was the canary in the coal mine.
At the heart of this disaster was an even more fundamental problem.
The problem of inadequate levees, of failing infrastructures.
Another infrastructure problem area would be highlighted two years later in Minneapolis,
Minnesota.
On August 1st, 2007, a major bridge crossing the Mississippi River on Interstate 35 West
collapsed, killing 13 people and injuring 145.
The causes were under-designed reinforcement plates and overloading.
Causes that could have been prevented.
The failure of New Orleans levees and the Minneapolis bridge signaled something was
disastrously wrong with America's infrastructure.
This physical structure and networks that support the country's functioning and economy.
When America's infrastructure fails, the impact on Americans is devastating.
For years, the American Society of Civil Engineers had been issuing a call to arms to fix the
problems, but no one seemed to be listening.
Most of the engineering societies, some of them do report cards.
They generally give our infrastructure a D plus or C minus rating if you're looking
at a grade, you know, A-B-ing really good.
As the first decade of the 21st century was coming to an end, Americans no longer could
ignore the wake-up call.
The country was falling apart.
America's infrastructure its highways, roads, bridges, dams, water supply, an electrical
grid are so outdated they are failing and putting the whole nation at risk.
Not only are the structural components of America's infrastructure in need of continual
repair and replacement, but many pieces of America's infrastructure
are now past their useful design, such as when the Fargo North Dakota Levies failed to hold
back the Red River flood waters in 2009.
Similar outdated designs have been exposed in electrical grid blackouts during heat waves.
Water use restrictions during droughts and dams that are inadequate to handle the more
intense rainfall amounts brought about by climate change.
And just as important, is the need to engineer and build brand new additions to the nation's
infrastructure?
Additions such as broadband to facilitate communications.
And an electrical grid that can accommodate new 21st century sources of electrical generation,
such as solar farms and wind farms.
In the end, how America handled its infrastructure problem may be the most critical action taken
to ensure its future economic leadership on the world's stage.
From the start of the 20th century, America has been a sports-crazed nation.
And in the 100 years since, sport has become one of its biggest businesses.
But in the first decade of the 21st century, a dark cloud fell across the nation's number
one pastime, baseball.
The oldest most revered record in sports is baseball's home run record.
Every season, fans follow the teams and players to see who is belting them out of the park.
So on August 7th, 2007, when Barry Bonds hit number 756, surpassing Hank Aaron's all-time
home run record, the celebration should have made America go wild.
But everyone was asking the question, was bonds juicing or not?
Was he using steroids to boost his performance?
Performance enhancing drugs have been around for decades.
But by the end of the 20th century, the pressure to perform at a superstar level made many
athletes use performance enhancing drugs.
So much so, that the first decade of the 21st century became known as the Steroid Era.
The Era of Cheating In 2005, Congress decided to weigh in on
the scandal and hold hearings.
Congress, indeed all of America, was worried that the overwhelming use of steroids by
athletic role models was setting a bad example for America's young athletes.
And this seemed to be true.
By 2005, steroid use among teenagers had risen from 2% a decade earlier to over 6%.
That was also worried about the dangerous psychological side effects of prolonged steroid use.
And perhaps even more damaging, it had become commonplace to see athletes embarrassing
confessions of doping on television.
Such as baseball superstar Alex Rodriguez in 2009.
And Olympic athlete Marian Jones in 2007.
In 2007, the follow-up Mitchell Report showed performance enhancing drugs were everywhere
in American sports.
They had become so prevalent that steroid use even spawned its own descriptive phrase.
The expression "on steroids" came to mean someone or something is pumped up, exaggerated,
more intense.
By 2009, every major sport had mandatory drug testing, an important first step in making
American sports whole again.
Among America's most cherished civil liberties are the freedom of speech and freedom of the
press.
Although everyone in America enjoys these freedoms, until recently, only a few have
had access to the marketplace to publish their ideas.
That marketplace was concentrated in the hands of newspaper owners.
In the operators of radio and TV stations, and in the 1980s, cable television brought
in the 24-hour news channel.
However, ownership of these media channels was still concentrated in a few companies.
Remarkably, in the first decade of the 21st century, a great leap forward was taken.
Anyone with a computer and access to the Internet could publish their ideas and have immediate
connection to millions of Americans.
Indeed, thanks to the Internet phenomenon of YouTube and blogging, American media have
been democratized forever.
The word blog is a blend of two words, web and log.
It is a website where an individual makes regular commentaries on anything.
Personal matters, politics, sports, entertainment, or social events.
Almost overnight, millions of people began writing and publishing their thoughts via
the Internet.
And almost overnight, the blog became part of the American media consciousness.
In the beginning, the blog remained a fringe form of media.
Then during the 2004 presidential race, CBS News anchor Dan Rather presented documents
on the CBS Show 60 Minutes.
Claiming President Bush's military service record was not what the President said it
was.
Within hours, bloggers presented evidence that the CBS documents were forgeries.
Rather and CBS were forced to apologize, and Dan rather lost his job as America's number
one news anchor.
By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, every major newspaper was online.
And Internet-only newspapers, such as The Huffington Post, were challenging traditional
news sources.
It's a pure legitimacy when President Obama called on Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein
at his first presidential news conference in February of 2009.
"You get the misdeeds of the Bush administration.
He said that before you turn the page, you have to read the page first.
Do you agree with such a proposal?
Are you willing to rule out right here now any prosecution of Bush administration officials?"
"I haven't seen the proposal, so I don't want to express an opinion on something I
haven't seen."
With this exchange, bloggers had shown the world they were now a permanent part of the
American news landscape.
In February 2005, democratization of the American news media took another giant leap forward.
The American Internet entrepreneurs Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jaiwood Karim founded YouTube,
a video-sharing website where users can upload, view, and share video clips.
The three Midwesterners, all in their late 20s, came up with the idea for a video-sharing
website while working for the e-commerce giant PayPal.
Through venture capital, within a few months, YouTube was up and running.
YouTube made it possible for anyone to post videos that millions of people could watch.
With the now universal cell phone video camera, anyone in the public eye was on tape and
instantly seen by millions on YouTube.
In addition, anybody with a serious point of view could post a video telling their story.
Today there are over 120 million bloggers in the US using the written word and videos
to express themselves and the figure is growing.
Bloggers in YouTube have become America's new media.
They have forever changed how America gets its news and entertainment.
100 years ago, at the end of the 19th century, homes, neighborhoods, churches, and schools
were where Americans created their social network of families and friends.
In the second half of the 20th century, the landscape of social networking extended to
the business and professional community, which often reached out across the country, even
to the entire world.
But in the 21st century, a new kind of community grew, the virtual community.
And as with most things involving the internet, once again, it was American youth that drove
the establishment of this kind of community.
At the operational core of these virtual communities were websites, Facebook launched
in February 2003, MySpace launched in August 2003, and Twitter launched in March 2006.
All three are social network services that allow their members to stay in contact 24/7
without ever having to meet in person.
A social network service builds online communities of people who share like interests and sometimes
activities.
New network services allow users to interact online through personal profiles, email, and
instant messaging services.
For centuries, America has been the world's center for innovation, and the creation of
the internet's virtual communities has been no different.
And entrepreneurs quickly saw the potential for people linked through cyberspace.
They could shed the isolation of everyday life and expand their friendships, business
partnerships, and acquaintances, from a narrow circle of people within walking and driving
distance to a global community.
All three social network services bring individuals together into communities of like-minded people.
But at the same time, they can be used to get out vital and urgent information quickly,
such as having severe weather warnings tweeted to your cell phone.
A remarkable use of social networking systems was Barack Obama's 2008 presidential bid.
Throughout the primaries and the campaign, Obama and his staff built a virtual social
and political network that reached millions of Americans.
From students, to businessmen and women, to moms and dads, emails and text messages brought
this community together in an unprecedented push to get a presidential nominee elected.
And it worked.
Obama's landslide victory was a direct result of the online community he built.
In succeeding decades of the 21st century, the impact of these developing global communities
presents tremendous potential to transform social and political landscapes.
For example, after the Iranian presidential election of June 2009, Facebook and Twitter
proved to be beyond censorship by the Iranian government and allowed the world to see the
widespread protests regarding what was believed to be a rigged election.
On May 1st, 2006, a remarkable event happened in America.
From cities from New York to LA, Chicago to Miami, New Orleans to Denver, nearly 1 million
Hispanics joined by people from all nationalities, from all walks of life, marched together
in the largest nationwide protest since the Vietnam War era.
A protest against proposed anti-immigration laws that would severely punish illegal immigrants
and send them back to Mexico and other Latin American countries.
This march underscored the great divide in America between those who supported some form of amnesty
for illegal immigrants and those who want to see them rounded up and deported.
In 2007, a political divide exploded in Washington, D.C. between supporters and opponents over
whether or not to take congressional action towards illegal immigrants.
That year, the number of illegal immigrants officially topped 11 million for the first
time.
Unofficially, it was claimed that the count was more like 20 to 30 million illegals.
There was a large hue and cry to seal off the 2,200-mile border with Mexico.
Direct offense, increase border patrols, round up and deport as many illegal immigrants as
possible.
The other side emphasized that illegal immigrants had been here for many years and deserved
to stay.
They worked hard, paid taxes, the money they spent boosted the U.S. economy.
Their children were born here, attended local schools, and were growing up American.
And they performed difficult jobs such as construction and most importantly worked the
agricultural fields of the Southwest and California.
In response to the problem, President George W. Bush, supported by Republican Senator John
McCain and many Democrats, proposed a different solution.
A guest worker program that allowed illegals to stay working and put them on a fast track
for American citizenship.
The opposition, led by Republicans and a few Democrats, characterized the solution as an
amnesty program that rewarded illegals for breaking the law.
They also brought up national security concerns.
Unless America tightened down its southwestern border, another disaster like September 11th
was just around the corner.
Late in 2007, Congress could not work out a compromise and the issue was shelved for the
next session.
It was poised to be a presidential campaign issue, but the failing American economy shoved
illegal immigration out of the picture.
Even so, in the first decade of the 21st century, Hispanic political power was on the rise.
Many political pundits believe the Hispanic vote determined the decades three presidential
elections in the swing states of Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.
Now as America enters the second decade of the 21st century, the problem of illegal immigration
still looms over the country.
At the federal level, the issue of illegal immigrants seems to have fallen off the radar,
but state and local authorities are still hard pressed to deal with the pressure illegals
put on their services.
No doubt the illegal immigration issue will have to be dealt with in the second decade
of the 21st century.
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