I’ve been thinking lately (always a dangerous occupation) and I think it’s time we got a head start on our New Year’s Resolutions. Just like the number of months in a year and the number of disciples of the spiritual leader of our most popular religion, I’ve come up with an even dozen. Here are tangible, basic problems of our time that I think might serve as subjects worthy of New Year’s resolutions designed to solve them.
1. Running all our communications through one single technology, The Internet, which absolutely puts all our survival eggs in one fragile basket.
2. Global warming about to flood the shores of much of the inhabited planet with salt water.
3. Military, eating 52% of all our U.S. taxes, and long proven worldwide to waste $ trillions, making a handful of people very wealthy while leaving millions destitute.
4. Nuclear weapons, which I’m told we have 14,000 of in the U.S. alone.
5. Fearless leaders wanting to invest $billions more in new nuclear weapons.
6. Life-threating plastic waste in our oceans, which our media currently report as a “plastic straw” problem, while the real culprits are the corporations packaging everything they sell us in plastic with no responsibility imposed on them for the results to the planet.
7. Illegal drugs and legal opiates causing human disaster worldwide.
8. Hepatitis outbreaks among thousands of Homeless.
9. Millions of starving war-refugee children – a decades-long consequence to a war-addicted culture.
1o. The wars themselves, creating the starving refugees and most immigrants.
11. Spiritual leaders of billions of people prohibiting contraception as the world overflows with people it cannot protect.
12. Frustrated fellows like me, who can’t ignore it all, preaching we must all make serious earthly decisions about how to resolve these problems to better preserve out chances of possibly lasting a few more millennia.
That’s the good news. I’ll deal with the bad news in some future commentary.