Before some of us had taken down our Christmas trees and we were familiar enough with 2016 to write it without first having written 2015, swearing, and changing it to 2016, David Bowie (1/10), Alan Rickman (1/14), and Glen Frey (1/18) had died. 2016 has, by most accounts, been a dreadful year. And after the awful 2014 and 2015, my family and I endured, 2016 seems like a fitting ending to a trio of personally miserable years, the melancholy of which somehow leached into the world in 2016.
My children say it is difficult to buy gifts for me. I agree. My Christmas wish list keeps getting shorter every year, and the items populating it more impossible to purchase. I want more time with my wife. I want more time with those whom I love and still surround me. I want 2017 celebrated for finding a cure for cancer and an end to war and hunger. I want a return toward admiring intelligence and compassion, rather than insipid popularity and uninformed conceit.
I don’t want to make America great again. I want us to want to make the world great now. And that begins by understanding the real problems facing the world and the real issues affecting its people. Not the top issues paid for by lobbyists and bought by elected officials.
We don’t seem to have found the answers to those problems and, thus, they remain on my wish list year after year. Perhaps 2017 will be the year. Anyway, that’s what I want for Christmas. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone.
Thoughts at Large 