The trend of the past few weeks has been to trash the 00's or aughts, whether seriously or humorously. But as the decade slips from view, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein offers some belated love. Here's why he thinks we may yet learn to look back on the past ten years with fondness:

In the grand sweep of history ... I'd bet the Aughts will be remembered more as the age when the internet transformed everyday existence than anything else. It's the age of Google, of Wikipedia, of blogs and video on demand and YouTube and e-readers and GPS in our pockets and e-mail everywhere we go and online connectivity from airplanes and Christmas shopping from Amazon.

Klein doesn't deny that September 11, the financial crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made the decade "economically and psychologically difficult." But he suggests some of the gloomy reviews of the 00's may be overstating the case a bit:

My sense is that when all is said and done, just as the 1990s weren't quite as calm and meaningless as some believed, the events of the Aughts weren't quite as transformative as they seemed. Indeed, I'd much rather be alive in 2010 than in 2000. Technology has made this a better year to live in even as the intervening years have been bad ones for the country. Our future will have a lot more to do with the internet than with Iraq. At least, so I hope.

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Heather Horn