Next Year Will Be Better

Dec. 29, 2004

This is the time of year when it’s as tough to write an opinion column as it is being a trash collector during the high, hot days of August. Like you, my head is deep into Christmas and New Year, family and friends, without a single thought for anything else. Let the world take care of itself for a week -- we’re busy getting back to basics. Everything else is just trash.
Plus, 2004 sucked and I don’t care to recall it. Somebody pass the optimism, please. My shaker has all run dry.
Next year has got to be better. Simple reason is because it can’t get much worse than 2004, a year of deep division and stalemate.
The division stirred up in our country is a strong case for the pleasures of amnesia: Swift Boat Veterans, the rah-rah for the war, gay marriage, the propaganda on Fox News, Dan Rather’s blind spot, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Red States vs. Blue, arrogant “Rummy” Rumsfeld, the $800 billion national debt, family members pitted against each other... Waking up from 2004 is a Godzilla-sized hangover after a night dancing with zombies. Good riddance. Let’s hope we pull it together in ‘05.
For starters, good luck, President Bush. You started the war in Iraq; you turned off most of our strongest allies in the process against all pleas for common sense, and now you own it.
A lot of our brave young people never made the phone call home on Christmas Day because of a war which history will reveal as a crusade of delusional neoconservatives wrapped in their naked lust for oil. At a time when even the naive American people are wising up to the fact that the war wasn’t such a great idea, all hopes are riding on the Iraqi national elections in January. Of course, those elections could well kick off the Mother of All Religious Civil Wars with Shiites bloodletting the Sunnis and our guys caught in the crossfire, even worse than now. So good luck and God help us all.
The Democrats? Talk about a lost tribe. “Who Moved My Cheese?” should be mandatory reading. It’s a management bestseller about two hungry characters in a dark maze who find a fantastic hoard of cheese. One day, however, the cheese disappears. One guy (a Democrat?) just sits there and frets, visiting the empty treasure room day after day -- the cheese never turns up. Over time, the other guy comes to the painful revelation that he has to go back into the dreadful maze to hunt for the cheese. He learns that those who cope with change succeed.
So let’s be optimistic. Someday the Democrats will make their way through the incomprehensible maze of what Americans want to find that elusive cheese. Maybe.
The Red States? Please get over yourselves; even your supporters don’t have much good to say about you.
The Red States are not exactly centers of enlightenment, are they? They are America’s poverty states; the states with the lowest-paying jobs; the lowest levels of education; the highest pollution; the states that suck up the most federal revenues provided by the Blue States. Even Fox News, the flag-bearer for red-blooded Americans, has little praise for the Red States. They’re described as stereotypes: people who are proud of the fact that they are anti-intellectual and despise the French and have never been anywhere more foreign than Disney World. Yet these are the people who have chosen America’s path through a dangerous world. Who are they going to call when their last few jobs are outsourced to India? Who will they call when the federal deficit gobbles up Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and money for education, roads, hospitals and all we take for granted?
Let’s get on to being the Purple States.
2005 has got to be better.
Currently, I’m watching the extended version of “The Return of the King,” part three of the trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. Way back in 1916 or so, Tolkien theorized that if a catastrophe is a sudden disaster, then there has to be an opposite reaction called a “eucatastrophe.” The idea is that out of a disaster, a sudden great thing can occur, changing things for the good.
For Tolkien, the catastrophe was losing all of his friends on the battlefields of World War I. The “eucatastrophe,“ however, was turning that disaster into something good by honoring his friends with his great work, “The Lord of the Rings.”
We need a eucatastrophe in 2005.
Something like a tornado of goodwill that will rise up out of all the turmoil in the world and blossom like a rose. Next year has got to be better.