Some years I post basically satiric resolutions for other people.
2024 was not a great year in a lot of ways, and 2025 promises not to be, thus making anything comedic seem rather inappropriate.
So this is a bit more serious.
The general election of 2024 was truly the worst one in the country's history. Two ancient men were offered up by the nation's two major political parties, with those parties only agreeing on the lie that you must vote for one of the two of them. The Democratic Party, which emerged for a while after World War Two as a center left party representing the working class, completed its post Vietnam War lurch to the far left and couldn't claw its way back from there. The Republican Party, formerly the party of conservatism and business, was destroyed by Donald Trump and his populist minions, a process set in motion in the 1970s and Reagan's Southern Strategy, thereby becoming a new expression of the Dixiecrats. The attack on education that began in the 1980s under Reagan seemed to bear weedy fruit as well, as middle class Americans, and some upper class Americans, grasped onto utter fictions offered up by Trump and company which promised to return the country to a fictional perfect past. Many voters, of course, felt trapped and voted both for and against politicians based on social issues which the Democrats in particular had helped bring into the forefront resulting in their defeat.
So, some serious hopes, if not resolutions.
Americans need to quit believing in something because it sounds like something they wish to be true.
We can't be an island insulated from the world. We've hoped to some degree to that since day one, but we've never been close to achieving that status. George Washington may have urged us to avoid foreign entanglements but we were involved, on an undeclared basis, in what were essentially two world wars by the early part of the 19th Century, one against France, and another against the United Kingdom and her allies. While many have long declared that "we aren't the world's policeman", if we aren't there's hardly any police at all. And if new police arise, there's a really good chance we won't like it. Our best hope, if we get to that point, is that its the combined countries of Europe, but what if, instead, its the People's Republic of China?
The internet and modern travel have shrunk the world so much that there's no escaping the impact of even minor disruptions around the globe. A war in Ukraine increases the cost of pasta in Italy and groceries, thereafter, in the US, as the most minor of examples.
We can whine about "forever wars" but the truth of the matter is that we haven't fought a substantial war since we backed out of Vietnam in 1973. Even at that, there were fewer men garrisoned in Vietnam at the height of the American involvement in the war than there were involved in the Battle of the Bulge, which of course was a single American World War Two battle. All wars are serious and horrible, but the post Vietnam War conflicts we've been in have, in real terms, been minor in comparison to anything that came after 1975's fall of Saigon.
We can't ignore the globe.
Climate Change is real and needs to be addressed basically 30 years ago. There is still time to act, but that action needs to be massive and drastic. Believing that this isn't the case is an example of willful denial of science and ultimately an act of theft, if not murder, of future generations. Denying this because my income is based on oil, and I freely concede much of mine is, doesn't change the reality.
Science of all types needs to be taken seriously. Sure, it isn't always right, but it's more often right than the ravings of somebody who bases their positions on the spouting of former Playboy centerfolds or quack celebrities.1
On this, vaccinations work. They do. If you don't want to get vaccinated, don't, but don't pretend that's because Bill Gates is looking for a way to steal your lunch.
On science, we need to comport more to nature. That includes our own natures. Poisoning the womb and murdering infants in the womb isn't "health care", its poisoning yourself and murdering your offspring. Its' deeply anti natural.
Along the same lines, there are only two genders in mammals. That's it. You, smart primate, are a member of the most sexually dimorphic species on the planet and are either deeply male or female. Those pretending otherwise as to their persons are mentally ill, either temporarily or perhaps more permanently. Society doesn't need to accommodate, in any fashion, this illness.
Homosexuality is the same, some sort of disorder, but not one that presents a societal threat through its tolerance. It does, however, due to excess accommodation. One of the world's oldest institutions, marriage, has been so damaged. But much damage had already been done to marriage due to the erosion of a serious understanding of what it is.
Of course, that was long in coming and gets to the next topic. Many societal institutions exist for the preservation and protection of society itself, not to make you "happy" or "fulfilled". Starting in 1953 we began the massive erosion of societal institutions and its been a complete disaster. There needs to be a serious effort to claw back that which has been lost, including in this area. There's no reason to tolerate extramarital procreation, whether its by some nameless drug addict or Elon Musk. Societal norms need to be restored.2
This gets necessarily to the topic of religion, which has been in the news constantly this year. It's odd if you realize that we can now so easily access early Christian texts that we can determine what early Christians believed very easily, and it often doesn't look anything like what's coming from The New Apostolic Reformation, or for that matter the "reformed" branches of the 16th Century Reformation, none of which has kept people from imagining Donald Trump as a latter day Cyrus the Great.
In 2024, when the writings of 124 AD are easily available, "religious" Americans who feel that Christianity stops at their own front door and that what they do is okay as they do it, are often far off the mark. Finding Donald Trump to be a "Godly man" with his serial polygamy and what not is absurd, but then people getting married again and again and pretending that comports with the faith also are out to lunch. It's not just Christianity, we'd note, that suffers from this.
Nature cares little if you accept nature and its doctrines. It simply gives the dope slap to those who don't. Not immediately, but sooner or later. The Populists who seized control of the country have a chance to recreate the county into what they imagine it should be, but only if they accept that. Chances are, of course, that National Conservatives will rapidly eclipse them in a year or two with Donald Trump's inevitable passing or inescapable dementia, and like it or nor, they appear to have a firmer grasp on this. People should ponder it and try to get a grasp themselves.
Part of that would be that if you feel a politician or a super rich dude has your interest in mind, or that if you believe that economics serves your own economic interest because it must, or if you feel that God abhors your homosexual neighbor but is okay with your third marriage, you need to rethink things.
Footnotes
1. Jenny McCarthy, who seems to have dropped off the public radar, was famous initially for being a brash Playboy centerfold was an early backer of the vaccines cause autism baloney. They do not. Now we see Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., backing that absurd view.
2. The other day I saw an item on Twitter in some dimwit on Twitter claiming some level of authority stated:
Taylor @taylor_vahey
waiting until marriage to have sex with someone is incredibly stupid due to the fact that sometimes two people are not sexually compatible
do not wait until you are locked in for life to find that out
That post is so moronic, on multiple levels, that it could lead to a long thread itself, but only a blistering rich and narcissistic society would even have a concept in some quarters of sexual compatibility.
Our species, homo sapiens sapiens, has gone from nearly being driven to extinction 900,000 years ago to dominating the globe. We know for a fact that homo sapiens sapiens mated with homo sapiens neaderthalensis, and we're we're learning that we, and the Neanderthals, mated with the Denisovans. Sexual compatibility doesn't seem to be a human problem.
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