Well, 2017 is gone, and 2018 is here. I'd like to wish all of you, dear readers, a happy and healthy new year!
There were so many amazing stories this year ... so many stories that made us smile and warmed our hearts. Stories such as the total solar eclipse that made us stop and look up (with special glasses, that is) and marvel at the heavens ... England's Prince Harry's engagement to American actress Meghan Markle ... India's Jet Airways giving a lifetime pass to a baby born on board one of its flights ... April the giraffe giving birth (finally!) to a healthy male calf ... and a homeless man spending his last twenty dollars to help a stranded woman and she raises nearly $400,000 for him in return. Every year, these kinds of stories always keep us marveling at life and restoring our faith in humanity.
However, this year, many of the stories had me wanting to eschew profundity for profanity in my postings. President Trump leads the pack of those kinds of stories. His words, both spoken and tweeted, and actions run the gamut between embarrassing to disgusting. His (what I will call) mission of destroying the presidency, and democracy itself, while operating as an autocrat has had very little resistance from his own political party, the Republican Party. In fact, the enabling and outright support he has received from his own political party has allowed him the continue to say and do things that are disgraceful or, at best, unpresidential. It resulted in the recent wealth grab "tax bill", effectively rendering the United States a kleptocracy.
Other stories from 2017 that unsettled me in one way or another include North Korea's heightening of tensions (this is, in great part, due to President Trump, too) ... the multiple-hurricane onslaught in August and September ... more mass shootings (over 300, including Las Vegas, a Baptist church in Texas, and, just yesterday, Colorado and New Jersey) ... wide-ranging famine (Nigeria, Yemen, southern Sudan, and Somalia) ... major earthquakes (Mexico, Iraq-Iran border) ... terrorist attacks here and around the world, particularly bombings and driving into crowds of people ... pro-Nazi protests in Charlottesville, Virginia ... enormous wildfires in California ... North Korea sending home an American student who was in a coma (and who died one week after returning) ... and the beginning of the great sexual harassment comeuppance (#MeToo movement).
The fact is, I originally wanted to write this New Year's as nothing more that an opportunity to gripe. Heaven knows there is plenty to gripe about, and complaining is, indeed, a necessary part of healing. That's the rub ... it must be a part of healing, lest it becomes part of the problem. With all of the hopes and dreams a new year brings, it brings bad things, too. This year will be no different in those respects, but this year must be our year of uprising. We have seen what those in power have been doing. We have seen what they did just last year alone. We know their goals. The few are taking away more and more from the rest of us. Our country is being taken away from us, and it's now happening faster and in larger measures, and we must take it back!
If we do not, we might as well send invitations to them to go ahead and take it, take it all.
In that spirit, this year's musical post on this blog is Muse's 2009 hit 'Uprising'. Happy New Year, dear readers! Let's make this a great year!
Terry
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