How New Can A New Year Be?

Does A New Year Infer New Thinking?

We toast each other! We receive phone calls from people we seldom hear from. We visit neighbors and share a memory or two. There is no way to escape the fact that we have entered a time of change, we have begun what the calendar dictates is "a new year!" ....Still, the New Year becomes for us what we hope is an opportunity to start afresh; yet our insides warn us that perhaps we expect too much from a blip on a calendar considering that all of the baggage from last year has not simply evanesced in a whisp of smoke. Perhaps, more hopefully, we wish that we could start with a blank slate but we know it can't be that way....

Oh, it sounds so inviting: Imagine being able to really wipe away all of our mistakes as if they were inscribed in chalk on some metaphysical black board, start off fresh…but the truth is far different. We have inherited a cast of characters and a range of plots that almost by osmosis we find ourselves absorbed in whether we want to be or not.


Nevertheless, there are positive signs that perhaps, yes, we shall be able to change things…

After all, we have a democratic congress in 2007, something we didn’t have in ’06.
Nancy Pelosi says that she is going to begin almost immediately in making peace with Congress and introducing change. We are already seeing a raft of candidates ready to immerse themselves into the presidential race. Perhaps rationality will prevail after all.
And if that isn’t a happy thought, what is…

Well, even the most curmudgeonly of us might have to agree it’s a lot better way to start than viewing a future of more of the same. More of the same blindness to what is going on in the world; more of the same indifference to the idea of bold new strategies to change America for the better.

Yet, we are not home free and clear.

There are policies in place that move forward through Republican support and their own inertia whether deemed right or wrong. The military industrial complex has a cause and it has been growing enough to swallow most of America’s available budgets…

And some of our best visionaries see a host of problems that will not go away any time soon.

Will anyone investigate our invasion of Iraq much less the abuses that have characterized the last four years?

Hardly. After all, do we want to antagonize the architects of these failed plans.

Will anyone agree that global warming demands an immediate and massive overhaul of current policies ranging from our consumption of fossil fuels to our policies regarding the preservation of marshlands and species?.

Perhaps, but it is doubtful considering all of those with special interests who campaigned against those tree huggers, “pinkos,” liberal types who think more of trees than human beings in one of the most effective campaigns to blame the messengers than those guilty souls who care not a whit for the future of mankind.

Will anything really be done about all of these policies that see jobs moved to Third World Nations because the cost of labor is cheaper assuring the top executives that they will continue to accumulate the bulk of the nation’s wealth not to mention big perks while the rest of the middle class must make do with a wage that does not even guarantee survival.

Will we do anything about China’s stranglehold on our economy where China holds all the cards and condemned us to be the leading retail nation with staggering debt.

Doubtful on that score, too, unless China actually threatens the peace of South Asia or our leaders self-interest; notice the public interest enters very rarely into these considerations.

What will be done to change the course of the war resulting in our redirecting our energies to the people actually responsible for 9/11 not just a convenient stand=in dupe who had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks? Who has been peremptorily hanged as if that would keep him from divulging what he knows about the cast of characters who gave him the WMD in the first place. Ah, you didn’t suspect did you?

Not much as our policy seems to drift from the inane to the imbecilic… When you are doing badly because you don’t have a winning policy, the solution—according to our great minds—is to add more bodies into the equation…. Give us all a break!


And I’ve only scratched the surface.

We haven’t discussed the loss of liberties, our forsaken “privacies” as guaranteed by the Constitution, the idea of torture as an American strategy even though it has been outlawed by the Geneva Convention, our failed support for initiatives to solidify our relationships in the mid-east with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Our failure to offer a good education to every living American, or our willingness to do what is necessary to restore a decent home life to the inhabitants of New Orleans; or the multi-tiered challenges of not resolving the issue of illegal aliens in the US.; or the ongoing corruption and special interests that seem to invade every sector of government life…

If we can’t find answers to these questions that are consistent with the American way of life and our thinking, than whether it is 2007 or 2006, it will not make much difference.

As we move into the new year, we can only hope that democrats will remember why they were voted into office: The Country is anxious for positive change after six years of medieval thinking and a government that seems to have more in common with Louis the XIV than a contemporary Western civilization.

And we can only express our hope that rational minds will prevail and that all of our representatives will remember why they are in office and find their collective consciences.

Les Aaron