Immediately after Christmas, I spent three days in Montreal.

It's always a good thing, visiting Montreal, only on this occasion I was there in the aftermath of the attempted airplane bombing in Detroit, during the tightening of airline security.

I can't say that the extra security measures caused me much of a problem. I stood in some lines for a longer time. I was patted down. But the planes left on time.

A Dutch airport employee demonstrates the new body scanner that is being implemented on all flights to the U.S. in December 2009. (Cynthia Boll/Associated Press)

Yet, I was depressed by all this.

I'm not faulting anyone — not the security personnel, the passport checkers or the airline bosses.

I'm depressed because I just don't think all these people and all these new rules and regulations are going to really change very much.

Now, I'm not one who despairs easily.

But I am finding these days that more and more people have lost faith in the basic functions and capabilities of government.

Yes, there have always been those who have railed on against government in one form or another.

But this is far more deep-seated than before and has affected people I admire and respect, who are my friends and who, as my mother would say, "should know better."

It's taken a while but one of the worst decades in American history has worn many people down.

Big Zeros

It has been a Big Zero Decade. Or as the New York Times columnist, economist Paul Krugman, called it, the "decade in which nothing good happened." Let's get back to the would-be Detroit bomber.

His effort was a copy of the attempt by Richard Reid in December 2001, just a few months after 9/11, to blow up a commercial airliner.

Known as the shoe bomber, Reid attempted to ignite the explosive PETN he had stored in a cavity in his shoes.

PETN was the same explosive found in the underpants of the foiled Detroit bomber and had been used recently in the failed attempt to kill a member of the Saudi royal family. The prince survived, the bomber was killed when the PETN hidden on his body exploded.

Don't do us any favours

PETN and other non-metallic explosives theoretically can be found with body scans and pat downs. But, until recently, those methods have been considered too intrusive.

Now, President Barack Obama and Congress are promising to do better, to be more vigilant. Pardon me if I don't hold my breath.

In the Zero Decade, words were not only cheap but often foolish and I'm not seeing much change on that front.

Take Tom Kean, former co-chair of the 9/11 commission, who now says about the attempted bombing in Detroit: "I think this guy may have done us a favour.

"For the first time here, we are looking at the problems in Yemen [where the would-be bomber was bankrolled]. For the first time, the administration is really concentrating on this. For the first time, we're re-doing airplane safety."

That Kean has found Yemen on his map and is ready to "re-do" airplane safety is, to me at least, as fatuous as President George W. Bush's promise to restore and rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

"You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie," Bush told Michael Brown, the soon-to-be-discharged head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in words that would be played out over and over again on the TV news.

Flim-flammery

In the wake of Katrina, I was in New Orlean's Ninth Ward, walking among the debris of people's lives and knew even then there was going to be big trouble ahead.

I can't help but believe that if the majority of the population who were dispossessed were white instead of black, more would have been done.

Then U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell, at the UN Security Council in February 2003, holds up a vial that he said could contain enough anthrax to kill millions. (Elise Amendola/Associated Press)

Now I am not the sharpest tool in the journalistic shed but I knew flim-flam when I saw it.

And I saw it while standing outside the UN as then secretary of state Colin Powell was delivering the Bush administration's "proof" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and the United States needed to do something about it.

My vote for the saddest picture of the decade would be Powell and his pointer describing a "mobile lab" capable of biological weapon production.

I also watched and listened to all the fiddle-faddle about why waterboarding and torture were necessary at the U.S. detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. And why "renditions" — spiriting suspected Islamiic radicals off the street and taking them to countries where torture was practiced — were a necessary tool of American foreign policy.

It bothers me as it does many others, I'm sure, that no one of rank was prosecuted for the American excesses at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Generals walked while the likes of a junior reservist such as Lynndie England were convicted. The actual count was 11 soldiers convicted of crimes, while five officers were disciplined.

And on it goes

When the decade began, the U.S. was at relative peace. Today its military fight two wars, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. One, at least, is winding down, though without significant gain for the many, many thousands who died or the billions that was spent there.

When the decade started, the U.S. was enjoying its largest surplus ever; today it faces its greatest debt.

What's more, the housing market is in ruins and there are new fears the mess will get worse and trigger yet another downward spiral.

On Wall Street, bailout money was paid out and some has even been paid back. But I think we all know that much of this largesse will never get returned to the American treasury even as CEOs bleat for high bonuses and the right to gamble with our money virtually as they see fit.

And on and on it goes.

Even the new health-care plan slouching towards completion has been gutted of some of the key elements Obama promised voters.

It will do some good but like much from the Zero Decade it falls short.

It was to provide health care to all Americans. But now we learn that in the year 2020 the U.S. will still have as many as 25 million people uncovered.

You can understand why I'm depressed.

The only bright spot — and it's a dim light — the 2010s can't be any worse.