YAKIMA, Wash., January 14, 2013 – The holidays are finally over and, frankly speaking as a true curmudgeon, I’m glad. This last holiday season had too much mayhem for my tastes. Sadly, it started off with the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut, which cast a dismal cloud over the entire season. It ended with the idea that we need to employ more guns to protect our children.
Their reasoning went: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” OK, but will somebody please tell me what “a good guy with a gun” looks like, or acts like. Was the sad case of Trayvon Martin an example of a “good guy with a gun” watching out for his neighbor’s safety? How many “good guys” would we need? And, how do we determine, who’s a “good guy?”
Is it the guy across the street who goes out in the hills once a month and takes target practice on glass bottles? Or, is it a person trained professionally, one who’s thoroughly investigated and faces a batch of psychological tests that certifies him to be a “good guy?”
Here’s a New Year’s resolution for our entire country: We need to think long and hard about how we protect our children.
Speaking of resolutions, curmudgeons really don’t like making them. In fact, I’m pretty sure I haven’t ever succeeded in keeping one. But one finds comfort in the fact that most people don’t succeed in keeping their resolutions either. If people were able to keep their resolutions, then why are there so many corpulent people in the good ole USA?
Last year I decided to try a resolution that I thought I could keep. I resolved not to go shopping the following Holiday season. It was a great resolution. This curmudgeon would avoid sales lines, crazed shoppers elbowing and hitting each other in pursuit of the “one-of-a-kind gift”, crowded tables in the food court filled with screaming kids and crying babies, and I would avoid the endless circling in the parking lots like a hawk looking for dinner.
It didn’t work. My record remains perfect, because I broke last year’s resolution by going shopping this year.
The reality is that mostly young people are hopeful leading to the making of New Year’s resolutions. They resolve to lose weight or get a job. By the middle of the year they’ve gained back the weight they lost by joining a gym in January and working hard until March.
Also, too many of them are still looking for jobs.
So this curmudgeon asks a simple question, “What’s there to be hopeful about?” Big oil companies are still going to make billions of dollars, as will the Wall Street power brokers. Big banks are still foreclosing on homeowners at an unprecedented rate, including some homeowners who aren’t even delinquent in their payments. And, our politicians still can’t work together. Fact is, us older folk are not hopeful that we’ll get our April Social Security checks. And, if we seniors do, it will cost you young people plenty.
I think maybe the Mayas were correct. Maybe December 21st was a good time for the earth to end.
Larry Momo writes columns for the Washington Times Community Section and the San Pedro News Pilot. Image enhanced by http://www.infoa2z.com
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