The raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 brought catharsis and closure for Americans a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks. But the world had forever changed.

“When he was killed, it was supposed to be this global huge sigh of relief,” said Kati Collier. “But terror and unease continued, whether it was the Islamic State or mass shootings or Russian aggression.”

Collier was among more than 1,200 readers who responded to my recent request for a word or phrase to sum up the 2010s as they come to an end. She suggested “unease.”

“I had two babies in this decade (2015 and 2018) and the 2020s will be their formative years,” she wrote. “I hope the unease settles, for their sake and others.”

This has been a topsy-turvy decade of disruption and divisiveness. “Chaos” was perhaps the most frequently suggested word to sum it all up. Thank you to everyone who sent thoughtful and witty replies. I sincerely enjoyed reading your notes, whether they were a single line or several pages. And I appreciated how much you widened the aperture, not focusing on the outrage of the current news cycle but the developments by which history will remember this era.

You marveled at how much has changed on some issues, like gay marriage, but also how little progress has been made on others, like responding to climate change or the epidemic of gun violence. You recounted the strides, and setbacks, for women and racial minorities seeking equality. It was, for instance, the decade of belligerent birtherism but also the Black Lives Matter movement. You reflected on how technology has changed our lives, for better and worse. And you noted that the biggest flashpoints of the 2010s remain unresolved, from how much of President Donald Trump’s border wall gets built to what’s left of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act after a possible third trip to the Supreme Court.

There’s a palpable sense that this stretch will be remembered as “a transition into uncertainty,” as Cam Yearty put it. “We have left the ‘American Century,’ and this decade has shown that the future is uncertain and unlikely to be controlled by one country the way much of the last one was,” he said.

“Tectonic plates in motion,” said Gloria Clark, “and remaining so for the 2020s.”

“My phrase of the decade is ‘Things fall apart, the center cannot hold’ for obvious reasons,” said William Morris.

“Reality TV run amok,” said Kevin Hancock.

“A decade of inaction,” said Doug Taggart, citing climate change, gun violence and the national debt.

“This was the decade where the three defining crises of the time – global climate chaos, economic inequality, and floundering democratic institutions – revealed themselves to be intimately, intricately, and frighteningly self-reinforcing,” said Laura Dresser of Wisconsin.

John Atkins lamented the loss of “referees” and the continuing decline in public trust and corrosion of civil society. “Without any formal burials, we have witnessed the death of shame,” he said.

“The 2010s were an age of artifice, a decade of deceit,” said Graham Harwood. “Fundamentally I believe this decade represents a second gilded age. First impressions rarely stood up to greater scrutiny. . . . We post pictures to social media of the idealized lives we all purport to be leading, but [experts] say the pandemic of loneliness poses the greatest risk to average life expectancy.”

Pat Eisenberg sees “a lack of compassion” as the most troubling strain of the decade. “You can see it everywhere, from random people filming accidents and crimes instead of assisting the victims to prominent people boldly calling for people or groups they don’t like to be disempowered,” Eisenberg emailed from Tucson. “My dear father-in-law said in the 1990s that he thought people were just as intolerant as ever but had learned they should not say some things out loud. Now, people feel free to say these things out loud, in print and online.”

“We are ending a decade of retreat,” said Kevin Cronin, an attorney in Cleveland. “The U.S. has established a pattern of retreat from the global stage: NATO, climate change, science, nuclear controls [like the Iran deal], world trade, even the arts. We have retreated to our own little cocoon, seeking safety in the belief that non-engagement is the answer.”

At home, everyone could agree that Americans became less agreeable. “This country is reeling from a lack of unity and common purpose,” said Richard Bulman. “The failure of leadership in government to tackle this problem will be historically significant.”

“During the Trump era I feel that, just like all families, we have gotten used to fighting each other and forgotten how to appreciate what each person, idea, theology, and political party brings to the table,” said Rebekah Martin. “It is our diversity that makes Americans and our nation a melting pot – not our need to be right.”

“We have seen a complete abandonment of once-accepted behavior norms pertaining to respect and courtesy,” said Catherine Mergen. “In the process, we have seen our country utterly divided along partisan and hate-filled lines. Of all the damages Trump has inflicted, these will be the hardest from which to recover.”

“I am not sure this is the biggest issue of the decade, but something I have been thinking a lot about is how people in our country have evolved to lose their ears and develop over-sized mouths,” said Duff Donnelly. “Everybody is yelling at each other, and nobody is listening.”

My job is to listen, and I hear you. Based on the collective, crowd-sourced wisdom of readers, these were the dozen biggest storylines of the 2010s:

1) Climate change, from Paris to the pullout

“The biggest issue of the 2010s has to be the denial of climate change and the lack of understanding that, if we don’t do something now, it will be too late,” said Annette Ratzenberger of Nags Head, North Carolina. “We will become known as the ‘ostrich’ generation who put their heads in the sand and took no personal responsibility to ensure that this planet will be a viable living place for future generations. This is bigger than Trump. He is just the poster child for the ostrich.”

Patrick Cherneski mentioned multiple global heat records, the growing number of billion-dollar disasters, the growing intensity of hurricanes, the proliferation of plastic pollution, the dramatic rise in species extinction, coral bleaching and melting glaciers.

“It may take some time for this to become entirely clear, but I believe the passing of a tipping point in global climate change will prove to be the most devastating eventuality of this decade,” said Thomas Murphy of Prescott, Arizona. “I dread the thought of what our grandchildren are likely to face if they manage to survive to my age, now approaching eighty.”

2)Changing perceptions of how technology will affect freedom

“In the early 2010’s, the conventional wisdom was that that new technologies would inevitably help,” said Stephen Burke. “People would have access to more information to make decisions and hold leaders accountable. Governments could better engage with stakeholders. Citizens of repressive countries could organize to demand reform, as evidenced by the color revolutions and the Arab Spring.

“As the decade closes, the script has been flipped,” Burke added. “Disinformation is leading to division, and in some cases, violence. Extremist groups have leveraged video platforms and social media as effective recruitment tools. Governments in China, and presumably other places, are using big data to track citizen behavior with social credit scores and more traditional forms of repression. Silicon Valley titans use their troves of data to protect their businesses from competition and accumulate staggering wealth. . . . Technological advances still have tremendous potential to improve the world, but the unbridled optimism of 10 years ago has been tempered by experience.”

“To quote Olaf in ‘Frozen 2’: Advancing technology, it’s both our savior and our doom,” said Duncan Neasham.

“I had to set my spam filter to allow emails from my doorbell,” noted Robert Carlisle.

“This was the decade where we gave up our privacy,” said Jon McDowell of Landisville, Pennsylvania. “It won’t return. Most people did this while being completely unaware of the decision they were making. Children raised this decade have had their entire lives recorded and shared on social media. We still don’t know what all this data adds up to in the future, but it’s out there and there is no going back.”

Matt Ferebee thinks the “the Teens” will be remembered as technology’s adolescent phase, and he’s hopeful that the industry will mature. “In the same way an adolescent child grows more intelligent, learns new skills, and gains new strength from ages 10 to 19, technology has gone through a similar transformation from 2010 to 2019 with a tremendous impact on our daily lives,” Ferebee wrote from Chicago. “And in the same way a teenager may not have gained the requisite experience, wisdom, or a well-defined moral compass to know right from wrong yet, technology has also grappled with its newfound capabilities and influence in the world.”

3) The aftershocks of the Great Recession

Allen Linton II, a doctoral student in political science at the University of Chicago, wrote that a headline for the decade could be: “Capitalism Questioned.”

“The Great Recession was the biggest story. It was a gift that kept on giving – everything from mass addiction to Trump,” said Lisa Strick.

The decade that started with Occupy Wall Street ends with a democratic socialist in the top tier of contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, all against the backdrop of rising income inequality.

“Prior the Great Recession, technocratic centrism was the global governmental norm, coming in two competing but complementary flavors: center-right and center-left,” said Joseph Chambers. “Although there were issues that inspired contentious debate, the day-to-day tradition was one of management by experts. The financial collapse blew up that consensus by shattering any vestige of confidence that anyone knew what they were doing. In the absence of such confidence, it became much easier to exploit resentment of the system for political purposes.”

4) The collapse of post-war global order, and the rise of China

“Democracies around the globe were struggling with divisions while the totalitarian nations of China and Russia ascended in power and influence,” said Jonathan Schwartz. “Economically and politically, from the U.S. to Europe to Asia to Latin America, democratic nations were rocked by protest and division between the haves and have nots and the right and the left. More and more of the global economic and technological leadership was being ceded to China. Western democracies found it harder to create stable governing coalitions.”

“Leaders of both our major parties abandoned strategic efforts to promote long-term transformation across the globe in favor of short-term, politically expedient positions,” said Emil Skodon, who spent a career in the foreign service, including as an ambassador. “Among other examples, there were: the race by leaders of both parties to figure out some face-saving way to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, at the expense of abandoning our original goals for these campaigns; rejection of the groundbreaking [Trans-Pacific Partnership] trade agreement by both candidates in the 2016 election; and the misguided policy of offering rhetorical support to the Syrian people without the willingness to risk tangible action to back it up. The denigration of NATO and abandonment of international agreements by the current Administration only further advance this trend to absurd lengths. The ‘Shining City Upon a Hill’ seems intent on seeking shelter inside an isolated cave.”

Naomi Ridout said the most important story of the decade was “China’s return to one-man dictatorship” under Xi Jinping.

“It’s not just the headlines like Muslim suppression, annexing Hong Kong, or the [Spratly Islands],” added Bruce Bender of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “It’s the combination of unethical-intellectual-property-theft-capitalism with a regression to Mao-thought-style governance.”

Republican lobbyist Bruce Mehlman, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, says “deglobalization” is the best way to sum this up. “For two decades after the Cold War ended, corporations were pushed by Wall Street and enabled by Washington to become hyper-global,” he said. “To maximize shareholder value, they shifted their intellectual property to Singapore, information technology to Bangalore, manufacturing to China, assembly to Mexico, tax headquarters to Dublin, etc. There is a lot of (growing) backlash against this model. Populists and nationalists have come to power demanding the hyper-global elites stop working for global shareholders only and start working more for local stakeholders.”

5) The #MeToo movement, and another Year of the Woman

Trump’s victory after the revelation of his lewd comments on the “Access Hollywood” video helped spur the backlash that led to the #MeToo movement. Women were emboldened to speak out.

“Never have so many powerful people fallen so fast,” said Craig Albright, “because hushed, gross, reprehensible behavior finally became sufficiently unacceptable that it had to be rooted out.”

Though Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 as the first female presidential nominee of a major party, Nancy Pelosi got her Speaker’s gavel back in 2019 because of a historically large slate of first-time female candidates running for Congress in what will be remembered as another Year of the Woman, akin to 1992.

“The emergence of women as power players in the past decade is a key storyline,” said Ellen Malcolm, the founder of EMILY’S List.

6) Love won

In 2015, the Supreme Court recognized a national right to same-sex marriage in a 5-to-4 ruling. “Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. “They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

This followed, but also accelerated, growing public acceptance of the LGBTQ community. In 2017, Danica Roem defeated one of Virginia’s most socially conservative state lawmakers to become one of the nation’s first openly transgender elected officials.

“This was a banner decade for the LGBTQ+ community,” said Julie Janson. “While RuPaul’s Drag Race originally aired in 2009, it’s now in its 11th season with 23 major awards, including 13 Emmys. . . . But we must keep fighting.”

7) Black Lives Matter, and a backlash to the first black president

Obama was president for most of the decade, but he was replaced by someone who spent years fanning the flames of birtherism.

“The single most significant factor in the 2010s was President Barack Hussein Obama,” said Annie Chavez. “The United States elected a black man as president and that president brought the country back from the brink of economic collapse. . . . Trump is nothing more than a reaction to the transformative Obama presidency.”

There was a surge in wokeness, but also white nationalism. Systemic racism was exposed, but it endured. “Racism is America’s unsolved problem,” said Lester Lloyd.

The violence that broke out in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017 between white supremacists who were rallying to keep a Confederate statue and those who were protesting them was a low point of not just this decade but American history. Trump responded by saying there were “some very fine people on both sides.”

8) The immigration wars

“I think the story of the 2010s is the flood of refugees and immigrants that sparked nationalist movements across the globe,” said Dan Seals. “It is a contest between those who have lost their homes and those who feel their own homes are at risk.”

Immigration has proven to be an almost intractable issue. The last major overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws was enacted under Ronald Reagan. Bush and Obama tried unsuccessfully to do something. And Trump’s demand for money to build a border wall led him to force the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history – and then declare a national emergency to divert money that had been appropriated for the military.

“The one issue that stands out and stains our nation now and into the future is the separation of immigrant children from their parents and caging them in horrible conditions,” said Cate Timmerman Frezza. “How have we allowed this to happen and why are we letting it continue? We have forgotten who we -the American people- are, and history will record our lack of humanity.”

9) Obamacare’s fight for survival

“The most significant story of the decade is the Affordable Care Act,” said Anne Ladky. “It extended health coverage to millions of people who didn’t have it, materially improving their lives. It exposed the extreme partisanship that is now so obvious to everyone.”

When the law passed in March 2010, Joe Biden called it “a big [expletive] deal.”

Indeed, it’s been a big deal in the elections of 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018 and the 2020 primaries. Passing the law cost Democrats their House majority in 2010, but the issue helped them win back control in 2018.

Republicans almost repealed the law in 2017, but the late John McCain’s thumbs-down vote saved it.

The Supreme Court has also saved the law twice. As part of the tax-cut legislation in 2017, the GOP got rid of the individual mandate to buy health insurance. That prompted a fresh legal battle, which the Trump administration supports, to get rid of the law. It’s still being litigated.

Warren Faulk’s suggested headline for the decade is “Obamacare survives.”

“The ACA is now and will be for decades to come part of the fabric of American life and culture, and it, or its successors, will be held in the same esteem as Social Security and Medicare,” he predicted.

10) The conservative takeover of the judiciary

Mitch McConnell’s proudest achievement during 35 years in the Senate is preventing Obama from putting Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court when Antonin Scalia died in 2016. The successful GOP blockade didn’t just allow Justice Neil Gorsuch to get the slot. It helped motivate conservative turnout for Trump and might have made the difference in such a close election.

“This decade was filled with a thousand moments worthy of Greek tragedy but the Garland Affair . . . absolutely triumphs as the symbol of the decade’s miasma,” said Sid McCausland.

Walter Sorg said the 2010s should be called “the Mitch McConnell decade.”

Trump’s victory, and a willingness to discard long-standing norms like the blue slip, created an opening to pack the courts with young conservatives who will fundamentally change jurisprudence for the next generation.

“It may be a while before the full effect is realized but it will have tremendous ramifications in the future,” said Donald Thompson.

11) Dark money flooded into politics afterCitizens United

Arguably, the most consequential Supreme Court decision of the decade was handed down in January 2010: Citizens United v. FEC.

“Citizens United and the rising influence of the corporation has influenced everything this decade,” said Paula Fish. “The idea that money is speech and that corporate profits can sustain the economy over the purchasing power of the middle class has led us to a huge wealth gap.”

Ken Gilroy, a self-described “cynical Gen X guy” from Cleveland, sees “the Onset of Minoritarian Rule in the US” as a top contender for story of the decade.

Douglas Pascover recalled Ambrose Bierce’s definition of politics: “A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

“So, my argument is that, in politics, the big story from this decade is the masks coming off,” said Pascover.

12) The failure to address an epidemic of gun violence

Saturday was the seventh anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a 20-year-old killed 20 first-graders and six adults. Despite bipartisan efforts to enact universal background checks and other changes to the gun laws, nothing happened. And horrific mass shootings, followed by continuing inaction, became regular occurrences.

“The killing of students while in school, concert fans in Las Vegas, shoppers in El Paso and gay people at a nightclub in Orlando were all horrible acts of violence against innocent Americans,” said Robert Hedges of Ames, Iowa.

“We began the decade being shocked at the news of such unbelievable acts,” added Sharon Gibson from Port Orchard, Washington. “What is even more unbelievable is that it has become such a frequent occurrence that, although we are still sad, we end this decade in resignation and almost an acceptance that active shooters are now the new normal. These acts of violence are driven by some form of hatred, which is also a big story of the past decade in and of itself.”

Gibson recalled being overwhelmed by “a feeling of hopelessness” after the February 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

“Hopelessness started turning into despair, and then a wonderful thing happened,” she said. “The survivors of that tragedy began to speak out against gun violence, and the rest of the youth in the country joined in to take a stand for something they believe in, advocating not just for a basic right, but for change in order to save their very lives. Hope rebounds, and I expect we will see that when these young advocates become our new leaders in the next decade.”

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