WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

• It has been not quite a year since we replaced a Presidential buffoon with an educated, articulate, multi-ethnic young man who spoke from his heart about "change." What has happened?
  
• At his confirmation hearing for Director of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that "extraordinary rendition," where we have sent prisoners to foreign countries to be tortured, was a tool he meant to retain.
  
• The President has announced that past crimes by Bush officials would not be investigated – not even by a "truth commission" just trying to establish a record.
  
• Gay military personnel continue to be dismissed at the same rate as before.
  
• Despite consternation when Dick Cheney refused to divulge the names of energy executives who had come to the White House in 2002, the Obama administration refused to release names of its visitors until forced to do so by a lawsuit.
  
• Ours is the most virulent society since Britannia ruled the waves. We maintain more than 1000 military bases in other countries, so many that President Kennedy did not know, until the Cuban missile crisis, that we had nuclear weapons in Turkey.
  
• We have become a national security state bent on imposing our will and our culture on the world. The Bush Administration called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" in a memo written by Alberto Gonzales. Maybe our leaders, the present ones included, think of the Constitution as "quaint," too.
  
• In the words of, sheesh, Nancy Reagan, maybe it is time to "Just say 'no.'"

IN GREED WE TRUST

How did greed become the defining characteristic of the United States of America? When did capitalism, a rather bland 18th century formulation of the obscure British philosopher, Adam Smith, become the money grubbing I-got-mine-screw-you credo of our nation?

How does a country where 30% of its people prefer that the others get sick and die without affordable health care also produce the Peace Corps? How do those Christians, who know very well that Christ healed the leper, rationalize that the person who cleans their hospital room is not able to afford a hospital bed when she is ill?

What kind of two-faced hypocrisy does it take to vote a $1.7 trillion tax cut for the rich in the George W. Bush administration and then to stand on the same Senate floor now and say we cannot afford universal health care Senator Grassley, Senator Hatch?

How, indeed, did greed become the defining characteristic of our country?

HAPPY NEW YEAR

I know, it is not really a new year, except for many of us, it is. For kids returning to school in a new grade, this is a new year. For companies whose fiscal year ends in September, the new year is less than three weeks away. For teachers, this is a new year. And for those of us who love summer and dread winter this is, alas, a new year. Let is put up our tomatoes and peaches and basil. Let us store our tubersand bulbs and dream of next Spring's catalogues.

So happy new year to you and let it be so. Let go of the old year's barriers and tear down your personal walls. Lift up your goals for this year and set a new charge in your ambition machine.

Let the New Year Begin!