Towery: Looking for ascent to the shining city on a hill

Am I glad this past decade has ended.

I remember New Year's Eve of 2000 because I was working on a television retrospective of the 20th century. Had I known what lay ahead, I would have skipped that project and instead crawled under the set and assumed the fetal position.

Where to start with the past decade? George W. Bush won the White House in a chaotically contested electoral vote, only to preside over America when terrorists attacked the following year.

The dot-com economy crumbled, and then the very financial underpinnings of our nation were corroded by the actions of then-Fed chief Alan Greenspan. His incompetence as America's supposed financial "wizard" was rivaled only by his arrogance.

Still to come were two debilitating foreign wars and a far more vicious recession than the decade's first one.

Over time, the public's mood started gradually to shift toward a "change at any cost" mentality. Now, by the start of 2010, for the first time in my life, my country appears to be drifting toward European-style socialism, with an attendant loss of liberties. And Congress has obsessed over health care reform that most of the nation didn't even want, even as the economies in many states teetered on the edge of ruin.

Beyond that, the Obama administration's response toward terrorism seems to be so much lip service, leaving us all more vulnerable than ever.

The decade cruelly teased us. Each new ray of hope was destined to be blocked by some new reverse - the Enron scandal, for one; or the then-majority Republican Party's unwillingness to stick to its bedrock philosophy of limited government.

By the end of the 10 years, former Vice President Al Gore basically had turned "global warming" into both a pseudo-religious pursuit and a cottage industry, even as America shivered its way through massive snowstorms that ravaged much of the nation during the recently ended holiday season.

All in all, it was one lousy decade.

And I know that many readers have felt the hurt in their own lives. Homes and jobs have been lost, and savings erased. Believe me, I've known degrees of this pain myself.

And yet history demonstrates that things can turn for the better. When the 1980s were ushered in, I was young

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