Poll: Man, did this decade reek

By a wide margin, the 9/11 terrorist attacks are seen as the most important event of the decade, with Barack Obama’s election as president a distant second – even among his political supporters. And the sour view of the decade is broad-based, with few in any political or demographic group offering positive evaluations…

The breadth and depth of discontent with the current decade is reflected in the words people use to describe it. The single most common word or phrase used to characterize the past 10 years is downhill, and other bleak terms such as poor, decline, chaotic, disaster, scary, and depressing are common. Other, more neutral, words like change, fair and interesting also come up, and while the word good is near the top of the list, there are few other positive words mentioned with any frequency.