Something'll happen if we don't act

There's a problem to be solved, and we keep putting off a solution. Let me tell you: life is just going to get more complicated if we don't do anything.

I'm not talking about climate change or peak oil or teenage alcoholism. There's something else that really affects every one of us. We need to decide how to refer to the time we're living in. What are we going to call the last decade, and the one we're in now?

Even in 1999, it was clear that none of the last-minute names people had thought up would catch on: the Noughties, the Ohs, the Oughts and so on. Nor did anyone speak of "the turn of the century", because that still evoked memories of horse-drawn carriages. "Turn of the millennium" was much too cumbersome.

On January 1, 2000, I thought circumstances would force us to make a decision. So I turned on the radio, only to hear: "We play songs from the 80s and 90s, and the music of today." So much for that. And is the music we hear now really the same as what we heard in 2000?

Politicians are clever; maybe they've got it figured out. Barack Obama is fond of the phrase "the last decade" — so much so that he uses it as a euphemism for what others more directly call "the Bush years". It's somehow typical of Obama to have found a solution to a past problem but not a solution to one happening now.

Perhaps we are all too mired in the problem to see the solution ourselves. It was this way a hundred years ago as well. The phrase we usually hear — "the turn of the century" — was apparently not used at the time. It was thought up by historians a couple of decades later.

What's troubling about this is that "the turn of the century" was followed by "the years leading up to World War I". Practically any mention of the period 1910-1914, or 1910-1917 in America, is in reference to a catastrophic event that no one in 1910 could have imagined.

I can imagine a lot of disaster scenarios. So will the years 2010-2014 be known as "the years preceding World War V", "the age of terrorism", "the last days of the Old Republic", "Great Depression 2.0", "a few years before that giant ice shelf broke off" or "just before the robots took over"?

Perhaps things won't be that bad. In the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact, we are told, "Something is going to happen — something wonderful." If we don't act now, we'll certainly find out what that is.