As we round the corner into a new decade, how will we look back on this first decade of the 2000’s? I think it will be as monumental as the 1960’s or the 1940’s. With 9/11, two wars, and the election of an African-American president, some pretty significant stuff took place over the past 10 years. But there are 3 pressing sociological issues that I believe will make or break us in the new decade.  One is obvious, one is gaining notoriety, and the other is still a bit beyond the horizon. Following are these issues:

1. Food

Last night my girlfriend and I had a pleasant dinner of ground beef, a salad, and a nice Cabernet.  Oh so delicious. 2 hours later, we sat on the couch dumbfounded, awestruck, my girlfriend reduced to tears. Why? We just watched the movie Food, INC which shares the sheer horror, abuse, and disgust of the food industry. I’m not gonna lie to you. I love a good burger, a steak, rotisserie chicken, you name it. But after Food Inc, I’m confused. Something has to change. Consider the following:

–More than 9 billion chickens and turkeys are slaughtered each year. As the Humane Society Reports, “They’re shackled upside down, paralyzed by electrified water and dragged over mechanical throat-cutting blades … all while conscious. Millions of birds each year miss the blades and drown in tanks of scalding water.”

–Crated calves are tethered by the neck, pigs in severe confinement bite the metal bars of their crates, and hens get trapped and can even be impaled in their cages. These animals can barely move for months on end.

–90% of consumed meat in this country comes from factory farmed raised animals who are pumped full of antibiotics, hormones & corn all of which are unnatural & harmful to the animals.  Chickens have become so genetically modified to have larger breasts because that is what the American consumer wants, that they are unable to stand up for longer than a few seconds and spend the majority of their 40 day life-span sitting in their own feces.  Unless you get your meat, milk, and eggs from an independent family farm, this is the meat you eat. *

2. Health Insurance

It’s not just the food industry that is troublesome. We all know about the health care crisis. Much of it is caused by greed.  Consider this: 47 million Americans were without healthcare insurance in 2008. However, the heads of the major healthcare insurance companies earned as follows:

-CEO of United Health Group:  $124.8 million
-CEO of Aetna:  $57 million
-CEO of Cigna:  $42 million.

While these executives were padding their bottom line, there were 22,000 “excess deaths” last year amongst Americans between the ages of 25-64 because they were denied health insurance.**  The healthcare crisis is clearly at the forefront of everyone’s mind.  While it seems we are moving in the right direction, try telling that to the families of the 22,000 people who perished in 2008.

3. Endangerment of the Present Moment

While more abstract than the food industry or the healthcare crisis, something we’ll begin to hear a lot more about in the 2010’s is the endangerment of the present moment. As Facebook and Twitter take over and as the iPhone and Blackberry become smaller, faster, and cheaper, our free moments will suffer the sad fate of the polar bear or any endangered species. Is it me or is every waking second spent texting, emailing, websurfing, status updating, tweeting, etc.  I emphasize in my book Yeah Dave’s Guide to Livin’ the Moment that if we’re not careful, entire days go by without one single memory.

Think about it. A normal person, take me as an example, wakes up, gets right on the iphone, answers emails, talks on the cell phone on the way to work, does emails all day long at work, talks on the cell phone on the way home, and returns home to surf the web, play on Facebook, talk on the phone, watch TV. There’s less and less time free of techonology. There’s less and less time to daydream, to actually talk to the person in front of you in line at Starbucks, to lie down for a snooze, to savor life. The busier we get, the less memories we have to cherish. Right now, we don’t think twice about it. But in the very near future, I believe there will be a desperation for the present moment, for richer memories, for the very essence of life.

*http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/force_fed_animals/
**http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml