Memphis Downtowner January 2012 : Page 11
YEAR IN REVIEW by Terre Gorham APRIL MARCH 2011 FEBRUARY 1 T he International Year of Forests launched with the baby boomers hitting retirement age, and more than 10,000 of them a day turning 65 years old in a pattern that will continue for the next 19 years on a planet whose population has now surpassed the seven billion mark. Two years after economists declared the Great Recession dead, the general feeling throughout the country was that we were still wallowing around on the economy’s rocky bottom, with a seemingly equal number of progresses and setbacks: home prices rose and fell, as did foreclosures rates, hiring numbers, jobless claims, and all the other ambiguous numbers used to gauge the nation’s health. Most folks just hung on to see what was over the next hump. Renting became the new American Dream, and pizza delivery signs were spotted atop high-end automobiles. Deemed to be “in a slump” with “sub-par growth” and euphemisms galore, the nation continued limping forward as economic forecasters told us what we already knew: It ain’t over yet. Occupy Wall Street — under a rallying cry of “We are the 99 percent!” — staged “camp-ins” with the growing ranks of the fed-up masses, moving into financial districts and city squares across the nation, protesting the one percent’s control over government. Occupy Memphis arrived at Civic Center Plaza in mid October with a food tent, medical station, information booth, and more than 30 other tents. The Earth itself shuddered and rattled, most severely in Japan, where a trifecta of disaster began with a massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake — one of the world’s most powerful earthquakes of the past century — followed by a tsunami that stripped clean a 1,300-mile stretch of the northeastern coast, creating “the most difficult crisis since World War II.” Damage to a nuclear power plant caused the worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, and nearly a month later, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit the already blighted area. A new “Sputnik moment” kicked off during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, referring to the original “Sputnik moment” in 1957 when the Russians beat the Americans into space, and the U.S. suddenly realized it was not keeping pace with the rapid strides in research and development. For the first time in recorded history, the president’s birth certificate was released to the public. During one of the hottest summers on record, Congress sweltered in a stalemate over raising the federal debt ceiling to allow government to continue borrowing money to pay its debts. And although the Budget Control Act of 2011 was enacted at zero hour, it didn’t stop the U.S. AAA credit rating from being downgraded for the first time in history, and it didn’t address the elephant in the chambers: The nation is spending more than it takes in. So Congress agreed to call pizza a vegetable although its Super Committee charged with negotiating a deficit reduction agreement couldn’t agree on how to cut $1.2 trillion over 10 years and stave off automatic spending cuts that are scheduled to start in 2013. Just more than a year after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded into the largest marine spill in U.S. history, BP restarted its deepwater drilling. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was shushed out the door, and 10 years after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, mastermind behind the assault, was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan and buried at sea. The Iraqi war that began almost nine years ago as a search for weapons of mass destruction, came to an official end. As economies around the world teetered and fell, as the financial world turned upside down, and as doubt and fear were balanced with hope and resolve, a prince and a commoner wed at Westminster JANUARY 2012 MEMPHIS DOWNTOWNER 11 MEMPHISDOWNTOWNER.COM
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