I’d like a better attitude for the New Year

Published 2:00 pm Monday, December 31, 2012

Maybe I should have asked Santa Claus for it. Maybe I will choose it for my New Year’s resolution. I need a better attitude this upcoming year. Here is what I mean.

Have you ever experienced something that was so long and drawn out, something that you heard about everywhere you would turn; it seemed to be unending? Finally, you had heard about it so long, that you simply developed an “I don’t care!” attitude.

That’s not a good attitude. We should care about those things that happen in our lives and in our country, but by the time Washington messes with it and the television gets through covering it incessantly for months and months, I just want it to be over! It’s like that “fiscal” cliff that is all we have heard about for weeks and months.

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It makes me want to find some physical cliff, a real one, and throw all of those people who have been playing games with our country off of it. I need a better attitude this year.

I used to think that politicians tried to do something good every now and then. Now, I don’t know what they are doing, but it sure isn’t working at the jobs for which they were elected.
As I write this, it is New Year’s Eve and the news is all about last minute efforts and behind-closed-doors negotiations that are going on to prevent us all from crashing on Jan. 1. I am thinking this: What a pathetic way to run a country.

Take any entity that needs governing, from the smallest individual’s life or a regular sized family to the largest corporation or government. If any of those entities were to be governed or “run” like we have seen our federal government run for the last few years, they would crash just as sure as Wile E. Coyote does every time he tries to catch the Roadrunner.
We don’t make decisions anymore. We wait until a massive problem, which is great definition of our federal government’s financial situation, we wait until it is about to crash. Then, the leaders who seem to not even talk to each other anymore go on television with their kind of faux seriousness and blame the other for the problem.

Then there is television. It revels in seeking some kind of controversy for which they can create some snazzy, little phrase, like “fiscal” cliff. They create the phrase and spend the next part of eternity telling us about the dire consequences of the situation, as if they are the ancient Mayans, informing us that the end of the world is coming if these clowns don’t make a decision.

It makes my head hurt and I hear about it so long that I say something like, “I don’t care if we go over the cliff or not!”

Actually, I say things that are a little stronger than that — words that are best left unsaid. But like I said at the beginning, I’ve got a pretty sour attitude. For this new year, I would like a better one.