It might come as a disappointment to some readers that
The Prairie Editor, contrarian as he often is, will not be
making lists about the past year, special resolutions for
the present, or predictions for the coming year.
In fact, The Prairie Editor is not even calling it a “new”
year. He’s simply calling it the “next” year because any
year continues the year past without necessarily heeding
the markers of the calendar, and those events required by
the planet’s seasons and other annual cycles.
Nevertheless, the calendar is one of the constants in life,
and we inevitably take a pause in the Judeo-Christian
holiday season before taking our individual forays into
the future. To be sure, there are other religious traditions
in the U.S., and a sizable "secular" mindset among many
Americans about their daily lives. All this complicates
increasingly what we describe as “American,” and how,
in a year in which the nation’s voters make decisions about
the U.S. house and senate, many governorships and state
legislatures, we might anticipate the true mood of the
nation.
What might be said with some reasonable certainty is that
the U.S. and the other nations on earth are continuing to
go through a particularly intense, if opaque, period of
transformation, something which does not happen all the
time.
I say “opaque” because, in spite of the advice and counsel
of many so-called “experts” and other authorities, no one
really “knows” with certainty what is truly happening in
the current transformation in the world.
We have just endured a period in which the majority of
“experts” (in this case, scientists) told us that “global
warming” threatened our planet. We were given many
statistics to support this notion, some of which were
false numbers, but even those which were true were of
such duration, they were soon reversed, negating the very
hypothesis of global “warming.” The ice caps are melting,
we were then told, and now we are told the ice caps are
freezing. Advocates of “global warming” then adjusted
their rhetoric to say that the threat was “global change.”
This, of course, is like saying the sun rises and sets every
day. “Global change” is one of the constants of our
planetary existence. The “scientific” agenda of “global
warming” turned out to be, all along, a political agenda
for artificial worldwide redistribution of resources.
The newest political agenda calls for an artificial
worldwide and national (in the U.S.) redistribution of
“wealth.” Its rhetoric is idealistic and humanitarian, but
to use one of the movement’s favorite terms, it is not
sustainable. One specific manifestation of this political
agenda has been the enactment, and now attempted
implementation, of healthcare reform (known popularly
as Obamacare) in the U.S. Just as global warming
advocates hoped that a mounting contrarian statistics
would prove wrong, Obamacare advocates believe that
the current computer “glitch” which has troubled the
roll-out of the program will be fixed, and Obamacare
will be revealed in all of its positive glory. Unfortunately,
the roll-out procedure, whether it was good or bad, has
very little to do with the inherent contradictions of the
program. All the delays and waivers will not put the
Obamacare humpty-dumpty together again.
But this and many other “realities,” not to mention
innumerable surprises, are ahead in the calendar year
now begun, and beyond. It is also the U.S. national mid-term
election cycle, with all the delicious details and vagaries
of our voting suffrage. The Prairie Editor, at this early
point, is making no predictions. As we all know, anything
can happen.
So turn the page of your calendar from another December
past. Welcome to January and the interesting destinations
to which it leads.
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Copyright (c) 2014 by Barry Casselman. All rights reserved.
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