THE WORST OF TIMES OR THE BEST OF TIMES: WHO'S DECADE FROM HELL WAS IT?!

What kind of decade is coming to an end this week?

Some, including TIME Magazine, have called this "The Decade From Hell!"

Well, indeed, it was certainly pretty bad from a collective perspective, that's for sure. Unless you were a hedge-fund manipulator, or a banking, insurance, or pharmaceutical crook, or a politician on the take from same, the decade just ending, the one dominated by maggot-eating, obeise-berating reality TV and eight years of surreal, sexless saber-rattling and pseudo-religious posturing by the worst leaders in American history, you were pretty much screwed at every level in the 00's.

If you were in the 98% of the population not worth $50 million or more, you worked harder and longer this past decade and got less compensation in current dollars for your efforts. You were told that the schools your kids had to go to, the roads you had to travel on, and the levy's built to hold back hurricane flood waters from your city were all in fine shape, even though your reality said otherwise, often tragically. You were convinced that global warming wasn't real, but Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were, and in spite of the evidence, you were told that just telling teens not to have sex was the best way to prevent them from doing it, even as teen pregnancy rose and rose. But the good news was that you were systematically prescribed drugs to help you get it up, lower your blood pressure, emotionally numb you and basically keep you from complaining too much while you were being raped and robbed blind.

Here's a bit from the TIME piece:

"Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over."

And let's not even talk about the levels of inanity and stupidity diving ever-downward with the likes of Sarah "Wilma Flintstone" Palin, Joe The [not really a plumber] Plumber, Glenn Beck, Orly Taitz and the birthers, tea-baggers, end-timers and assorted other overmedicated Barney Rubbles.

But... was it truly "the decade from hell?" The interesting thing is that the answer to that question depends on from where you answer it. We are always creating our reality at two levels - individually and en mass. In spite of it all, I know people who fell truly, deeply in love during the 00's for the first time, or who created a masterpiece in their chosen art form, or found abundance without cheating or stealing from anybody else, or who healed their minds-bodies-and-spirits in miraculous ways without the slash-and-burn mideaval methods of mainstream medicine. Yes, a lot of good most definitely happened to many individuals, all within the larger context of debacle after debacle at the public levels of reality.

So, can the best decade, personally, simultaneously exist within the worst decade collectively? Of course. As long as you're not thinking and living your life from a strictly dualistic place.

A concomitant question that arises is: Can we be evolving collectively as a species if as a species we are collectively doing so poorly? Well, I suppose that's like asking if an alcoholic is evolving when he's in the process of hitting bottom. The answer is to some degree unknown because it all depends on what is done at the bottom, what choices are made there, and then, what the follow-up is. As a country, we may certainly be at our bottom, although just when it seems that our degree of denial has brought us as low as we can go, Joe Leiberman and John McCain raise a toast and take another swig of single malt bullshit!

Nonetheless, folks, you create your own personal reality from the inside out, and our collective reality, just like the weather, is a manifestation of all of our personal realities combined. So, as we approach a new decade, my advice is to continue to be as conscious and loving and connected as possible in your life, and perhaps you will be the Hundredth Monkey.

[Read about the HUNDREDTH MONKEY here.]