America in Adulthood

Behaving like an adult is not a pleasant thing.

It means realizing that you are not all powerful, that you are not indestructible. It means accepting that you are not the strongest, the fastest or the brightest. It means accepting responsibility for your actions, and sticking to your commitments even when you don't feel like it.

The turn of a decade is a time when many publish retrospectives and prognostications. The common themes this go round are 9/11, the tech bubble, the housing bubble, the banking crisis, Obama, the stock market and the wars. And in each of these there is the search for a label, especially when a decade has been so tumultuous, and yet so amorphous. Here's my take -
The first ten years of the 21st century will be viewed as the time when America became an adult.

Most assuredly the US has seen adults in its midst: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, King - the point is not to make a list. And just as certainly, there have been more than enough examples of immaturity : Sanford, Spitzer, Clinton, Bush 43. But what I'm taking about here is the culture of the society as a whole.

I'm sure that some earnest PhD candidate in history can tell you how many years it takes for a culture to establish, but its not the number that matters - its the changes in behavior. And what some are interpreting as America loosing its swagger, of an L shaped recovery, of any number of comments that the world is a different place; I am interpreting as a shift in behavior to an adult state of mind.

What does that mean in practice? - Stick around.