We have been through a hard 10 years. They were not, as some have argued, the worst ever, or even the worst of the past century. The ’30s started with the Great Depression, featured the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and ended with World War II. That’s a bad decade for you. In the ’60s we saw our leaders assassinated, our great cities hit by riots, a war tear our country apart.<\/p>\n
But the ‘OOs were hard, starting with a disputed presidential election, moving on to the shocked pain of 9\/11, marked by an effort to absorb the fact that we had entered the age of terror, and ending with a historic, world-shaking economic crash.<\/p>\n
Maybe the most worrying trend the past 10 years can be found in this phrase: “They forgot the mission.” So many great American institutions\u201d\u201dinstitutions that every day help hold us together\u201d\u201dacted as if they had forgotten their mission, forgotten what they were about, what their role and purpose was, what they existed to do. You, as you read, can probably think of an institution that has forgotten its reason for being. Maybe it’s the one you’re part of.<\/p>\n