Dear Little Brand New Year

Calhoun's Cannons for Jan 10 2014

Dear New Year,

Thanks for shoving Old Father Time out the door.  Now, that was a sucky year.  Let's see if you can do better with this one.  Here's my wish list.  See what you can do.

First, can you please make our Congresspeople smarter?  I mean, Louie Gohmert?  Really?  Maybe with smarter Congresspeople we'll be able to get something done rather than these endless rounds of Stupid.

I know, to get a smarter Congress, we'll need smarter voters, so see what you can do about that as well.  You can start with the people who watch Fox News.  Honest, there's a reason "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart loves that station.  In a word: Comic Fodder. Endless loads of Comic Fodder. The alternate-reality dumbth that spills out of the mouths of so many of their pundits is astoundingly funny, except it stops being funny when I remember that too many viewers actually believe it. And then go vote for people like Louie Gohmert.

I know, I know, we are, in general, a scientifically illiterate nation that also seems to lack a good deal of common sense. Or, as comedian Will Durst put it, " If God has cable, we are the 24-hour doofus network." It's discouraging. So whatever you can do in the coming year to wise up people will be appreciated. It won't take much.  Just the tiniest bit can have a profound effect. 

Like making voters understand that a Senator who votes to cut food stamps for the poor by quoting Scripture about earning food by the sweat of the brow, and also cites a need to save tax payer dollars, while simultaneously collecting sweat-free tax payer-financed farm subsidies for not growing food on his tax-write-off  "farm" is NOT a Senator who's going to vote for policies that will benefit you.  

It would also help if you could make us less scared.  When we get scared, we get mean.  And there's little sadder than mean Americans.  We have an overly inflated high opinion of ourselves, owing to the fake narratives we feed ourselves, so when we get scared we can't reconcile our fake narratives with what we're really feeling.  As a result, we tend to roar off in a fury to bomb some country or turn on one another, aided and abetted by special-interest puppet masters pushing our hot hate buttons. It's not a pretty sight.

Plus, remember, we're a nation armed to the teeth.  And a scared, mean, armed to the teeth nation, Oh, Dear Little New Year, that's not a good combination. So see what you can do to lower the fear factor.  Like somehow reminding everyone that every American has in his or her hand the tools needed to change a crappy year into a better year: A vote.  Stupid Congresses are not created by God.  They're created by us, and we can change them out for a better model.

 I mean, take income inequality, which is a symptom of a system run amok.  It's one of our false narratives that this imbalance is simply a fact of economic life, or some pronouncement from Zeus, so "nothing can be done."  Wrong.  Income inequality is a direct and deliberate result of a whole lot of political policies set in place over the years. Right now we are now harvesting what we have sown.  But our bitter crop can change. Change the policies and you change the inequalities.  Change the inequalities and you change the nation.

So, please Little New Year, see what you can do.  We're Americans.  We can do better and be better, both for ourselves, for one another, and for our country as a whole.

Plus, I don't think anybody could survive a rerun of 2013.  Imagine a year-long repeat of The Duck Dynasty,  another Congressional re-reading of "Green Eggs and Ham," and Miley Cyrus endlessly twerking with a big foam finger. 

And Louie Gohmert.

Surely that would violate the Geneva Conventions on torture.