Happy New Year

The anticipation creeps up and accelerates for months, and then, here it is: New Year's Eve. Here's my closing thought for the year:

Human beings in 21st century America have fooled themselves into thinking that some occult hand can control or prevent every horrible thing that can ever happen. We have become a soft, silly species, fearful of feeling anything but "safe." Total hubris, of the worst kind -- which the power structure promotes and exploits for its own purposes. The feds, for example, must stop every single possible terrorist on the planet. Weather forecasters must call every single freak snowstorm with plenty of warning for everyone every single day. Ridiculous. And when people are sorely inconvenienced by something so uniquely NOT in human control as the weather, they beef about how the government (or the mass-transit agency) should have known all about this with enough advance notice to prevent every crisis. And newspapers are the most chronic complainers in this vein. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

But on a lighter note: I am grateful today. It's been an elusive feeling in this year of buyouts, layoffs, pay cuts, midlife crisis and the like. But today, I aim to leave the old year and enter the new one with a fresh sense of purpose and renewed in the certainty that somehow, I'll be OK, my loved ones will be OK, and the world will muddle on through.

Peace.