The Obligatory New Years Post

By Bruce.

I truly wish everyone a Happy New Year.

What a strange little year 2008 turned out to be.

As emotional roller coasters for all of humanity go, 2008 has been quite the ride. I'm not sure how much effort I want to go into depth on this, but the moment we are living and the moment we will live for some time to come is the direct result of leadership decisions that have been made in the last eight years.

Even a change in government can't make up for the mistakes of the short-sighted idealistic notions of men who were so convinced they could translate their greed into a better way to run the world.

I have said this time and time again: To be politically conservative, or republican, or whatever right of center mind-frame you want to call it, it always means never, ever thinking about the consequences of the actions you choose to take in the face of the fact that that it was never done before for good reason.

We have spent the last eight years living at the clutches of people who are so egregiously self absorbed, so fooled into thinking that they have somehow managed to convince their mediocre minds that they can best the wisdom of the people who came before them, that we are now living in the greatest fiscal calamity of all time while we fight wars with no justifiable meaning.

They have brought us war on un-winnable notions like terrorism, we have wars on obesity, and we have wars on Christmas of all fucking things. It has somehow become impossibly fashionable to declare war on all things deemed unsuitable. We have trivialized war, the most desperate and brutal acts of all mankind is reduced to the needless wishes of a few with enough charisma to convince the masses to satisfy their egos.

We don't need war, the world we live in now is too complex, we need reasoned thought, thought that can see the consequences of its own experience and understanding. Thought that has the maturity to respect that good people who came before us who knew better than to second-guess the wisdom of all mankind.

I'm not convinced the current new leadership is up to the task, let's face it, the Bush administration has left an insurmountable task of repairing nothing more than the complete obliteration of basic human trust.

The biggest fear I have right now is we are all losing sight of the fact that we all have to work together to make this world work. In many ways our community has become too large to handle and finances and beliefs remind us too much of that in this current age.

But work together we must, we must trust our humanity like never before. We must trust the fact that we live in a world of differences that although it presents challenges to our fears and desires, it also offers us the chance to grow through nothing more than the most beautiful gift humanity has to offer: Our own diversity.