Ringing In the New Year

MIRACULOUSLY, I was up at midnight to ring in the New Year. Only I didn't do much ringing. A few sips of leftover beer, fireworks on television, a few in my neighborhood, but, thankfully, not many. I had to cheat to even be up at midnight. I went to bed at eight, slept a few hours, then got up. The days of starting the party at eight, ringing in the new year, and partying on til the wee hours I abandoned before I turned thirty five. Too debilitating. No new years resolutions for me. Haven't done that in years. I like the idea of using the first of the year to establish, reset, and reinforce goals, but I do that all the time anyway. The year 2024 sounds like something out of a science fiction novel from the nineteen fifties or sixties, and, in reality, it is. One goal of mine is to live long enough to get some kind of sense about whether the human species is going to fight and reverse climate change, and thus save ourselves and the planetary ecosphere. It may be that the answer to this will not yet be evident even within the next twenty years, although it seems like it will be. If we don't start doing more soon, there will be no hope, and within twenty years the climate change will have become extreme. If we do, then by the year twenty fifty or so it should be evident whether we have done enough, and climate change is being reversed or stopped, the cliamte no longer out of control with global warming. As we speak, here in 2024, the effects of global warming are obvious to nearly everyone, its getting worse fast, and the future, quite frankly, does not look good. Neither do future human prospects look good from a political, geo-political, sociological, and economic standpoint. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are shocking, horrifying reminders that human nature remains intact, uchanged, and that the near and distant futurees look to be soaked in blood. More than ever, nuclear war seems inevitable. In both of these wars, two of the world's nine known nuclear armed nations are involved, in both cases as the aggressor, and both Russia and Israel are quite angry, governed by ultra conservative war mongers, currently losing much and destroying much in their ongoing conventional wars, and both have already threatened and hinted at the possibility of using nuclear weapons. Until now, and perhaps now still, many analysts have believed that he most likely participants in a future nuclear war are India and Pakistan. The world wide political turn to the right, with far right wing populist demagogues taking power in many countries, is alarming, even as it seems quite likely to be but a passing socio-politico trend which will burn itself out, as its insanity and failure becomes obvious. The question is, how soon will it "burn itself out", and how many of the rest of us will it take with it? The nineteen thirties, with Hitler and Mussolini, among other right wing dictators, comes to mind. We see how that worked out. People today are so frustrated, angry, and disappointed with the cumbersome and growing pains of democracy and progress that they are reacting reflexively, trying desperately to return to a supposed bettter past, an imaginry past which never existed, and which, in truth, we would not want to ever exist. A past where innovation and progress are stifled by rigid, stagnant tradition. Change is as inevitable as the future itself. OUr only choice is to embrace it. Our choice is whether to make it progressvie change. We must try, and I'll try to stick around awhile to try to help, and to see what happens.