Yes, it does matter
Yes, that's what I said. I know we went through this ten years ago, when the Western world erroneously celebrated the arrival of a new millennium in 2000, but it's s a point worth insisting upon because it still matters: there was no year zero. The year in which Christ was theoretically (though not actually) born was 1 A.D. The year before was 1 B.C.
Another way of looking at the matter is that we are talking here about a calendar, not an odometer. The first day of each month is not the "zeroth." It's the first. Why, then, count our years from a date which not only never occurred, but from the very logic of calendars couldn't occur?
Ok. So now you're asking the obvious question: who cares? Why does it matter? The answer is that the dumbing down of our society matters. It matters that we know from newspapers and other records that nobody celebrated the coming of a new millenium in 1900, or a new decade in 1910. They knew how to read a calendar back then. They knew how to do basic math. And in case there was anyone inclined to fall into the error into which our whole society seems to have fallen into these days, the popular media explained the whole thing. Whereas in 2000 the media bought into the whole premature celebration of the millennium (TIME, to be fair, did point out the mistake in the editorial which began its special edition issued in commemoration of an event which in reality was still twelve months in the future, and ran an article commemorating the event when the real millennium dawned in 2001), at parallel moments in the past the media went out of their way to point out that the last millennium began in 1901, not in 1900, and that its second decade began in 1911, not in 1910.
To be sure, some of us protested back in 2000. But nobody in particular paid attention. And sure enough, the airwaves and casual conversation are filled with references to the decade ending tonight. But yes-TIME's patronizing tone nine years ago to the contrary- it does matter that 2010 is in fact the last year of the decade, and not the first.
It matters for the same reason that we teach children to read a calendar and to do simple math in the elementary grades. For an entire culture to have lost these skills matters a lot. And it matters, too, as a symptom of a time in which, despite an amount of information unparalleled in human history being more easily accessible than it's ever been before, the people of the United States are more poorly read and more poorly informed and less equipped to think critically than they were a century ago.
It matters that we think the millennium began in 2000 and that a new decade will begin tonight for the same reason that it matters that so many Christians today are biblically illiterate, and that so many professional journalists have such trouble these days with spelling and basic English grammar.
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