I've lived 70 years and every decade has had its political disasters, but most people either don't know recent history or have mass amnesia. They believe the past we've lived through was better than the uncomfortable present and unknown future.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the past was not the "Good old days." In the thirties we had the Great Depression. The 40's we fought in WWII. The 50's seemed benign, but we had a "policing action" in Korea which still hasn't ended.
If George W. Bush wanted to start a war, he should have invaded North Korea when Kim Jong-il was messing around with his missile and atom bomb programs. Now Kim Jong-un upped the ante by successfully launching a rocket that could carry nuclear warheads to California.
Of course there's no oil or much of anything else in North Korea except starvation, torture, and Weapons of Mass Destruction, everything we were told was in Iraq but wasn't (Well maybe torture, but not nearly as much).
In the '60's we had race riots, the Vietnam War, and the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The 70's was the hippy era, with drug addiction on one end of the social spectrum and Watergate on the other. In the '80's we had the AIDs epidemic and Reagan (Nancy in my opinion not Ron), elevated greed to a virtue, which of course lead us into the predicament we are in now.
The 90's saw President Clinton impeached, which was the Republican's revenge for Nixon's resignation over Watergate. The 2000's ushered in W. Bush's warmongering, cronyism, and incompetence. Why do Republicans only question President Obama's spending and waste and not the billions of dollars that went missing in Iraq under Bush II?
Now we have a recession, and Tea Party politicians who want to return to the 18th Century, and a President who can't get much done because of right wing obstructionism and his own limited leadership abilities. So how bad could 2013 be after this happy recap of past predicaments?
Here's a New Year's song I wrote around 1968. I updated it for this blog. I don't have the music to post and my singing isn't good enough to record it, so just read it as a lyric or a greeting card verse.
Happy New Year, Anyway
Wow another year has passed,
Time is going much too fast,
Seems like we just had the last,
but Happy New Year, Anyway.
Sing a verse of "Auld Lang Syne."
Drink a toast with last year's wine.
Can't avoid it, so resign
to Happy New Year, Anyway
Time Square, no care, singing in the street.
Day breaks, snowflakes, Oh, my aching feet!
Watch out for the Fiscal Cliff!
It makes our future one big "IF."
Still I'll sing just one more riff
of Happy New Year, Anyway
Tick tock, ball drop, counting all the way.
Midnight is right, when it's New Year's day.
Now we're coming to the time
To end this year and this rhyme
So to you I'm saying, "I'm
for Happy New Year, Anyway."
