2018 - I've Got Good News and Bad News

I've got good news and bad news this new year.

First the bad news.  

The electoral college (not the popular vote) certified a winner and Donald J Trump was sworn is as president of the United States.  He and his cronies Bannon/Miller/Sessions/Tillerson, and the Republican Party immediately set off to "deconstruct" the institutions of the country. The gutting of the state department, rolling back EPA regs, turning national parks over to oil companies, turning Fox news into a state run media mouthpiece, the war on a free press, and fake anything negative to the administration was just a small sampling of this deconstruction.  Which is all fine if your into that sort of thing.  I am not, however.  I personally liked a fully staffed and engaged State Department.  I liked clean air and water, an expansive national park system and particularly a free press.  

I liked being admired by the rest of the world and I loved we were its leader.  We have now become neither.  The trailer park trash that is the White House, (wait, what? I live in one of those!) is an embarrassment to us all whether you know it or not.  A narcissistic idiot, wrapped in pathological lying, and a gold-plated moron.  And those aren't my words, that's what his friends call him.  

This ignorant man and his sycophants are running things and if you thought this past year was a doozy, wait till the next one.  Trumps bigger button has another three years to be pushed to show everyone how tough and strong he is.  If we should all survive his childish tantrums, or rather the two Koreas, we have others to thank, like the generals surrounding him.  Imagine the US actually being led by a pack of generals - sounds so South American doesn't it?   

That pesky 35% out there that loves the guy regardless of what he says or does is troublesome.  They are thumbing their noses and throwing out their middle fingers at the system they think has wronged them.  Maybe it has.  No administration has really done anything for the middle class in decades  Look it up.  Some of those 35% are thinking rational people who aren't drooling and swathed in straight jackets.  These are the folks who hate the Clintons.  Yes, the last election was a perfect storm of flawed candidates.  Ask them about the tax plan that will create further debt on our grand kids and the plan to "reform" social security and Medicare to pay for it all.  

Maybe they see a brighter future than I but because we don't talk anymore I will never know.  Such is the political divide we have created for ourselves:  an open society which is now closed.  The banner motto to the Washington Post (yeah, that fake rag to the White House and the 35%) is Democracy Dies In the Dark.  Trump and his minions may be attempting to quash the light but I hold out hope that the world will right itself at some point.  I hold out that that we may yet find a leader who will lead us into the bright light of the America we all knew once but is fast fading away.  

Now, the Good News 

The honeybee population increased by 27% this past year and researchers have discovered an insecticide that doesn't kill them. 

Crime decreased by 2.7% this past year.

HIV/AIDS is no longer the leading cause in death in Africa.

A company in Argentina makes shoes from recycled tires and employs only women from rural areas.

The snow leopard has been taken off the endangered species list.

Child labor rates have declined by half since 2000.

In Lexington Kentucky parking tickets can be paid off by donating canned goods to local food pantries.

Scientists have found a way to rebreed parts of the Great Barrier Reef.

And finally, University of Iowa fans, at the end of the first quarter, turn and wave to the kids in the hospital across the street.

It's easy to forget that good things are happening.  I am a believer in the never ending arc of progress in mankind.  We are better than we were a hundred years ago and infinitely better than we were a thousand years ago.  There is simply no stopping it.  We endure speed bumps along the way but claw ourselves through it and persevere.  

We are still a good and decent people, all over the world, regardless of the political gamesmanship playing out daily in our respective nation's capitols.  No, Virginia, there is no "America First".  We are all intertwined and dependent upon each other.  Happy New Year to us all.   

  

(Some of the information for this post was gathered  from the blog Scientific Philosopher, which I like a lot.)