Of Bears and Penguins

Well, Happy New Year to all. The year slipped in on nascent wings, as it always does, and to the clatter of pie pans from the front stoop and the barking of an old gray dog. And here we are in winter, but lo, my heart is happy for spring is on the way.

Here is typically the paragraph where I relate my concluding thoughts on 2007, and impart to you my hopes and dreams for 2008. But I'm passing on that delicious opportunity in favor of simply moving on. Who has time to dredge up the past when the future is so brightly inviting? Not I.

The old noggin's a jumble of thoughts tonight, so it's hard to know what will keep and endure and what will blow away like chaff, gentle reader. For example, it seems important to mention that according to anonymous sources the water in New York is what makes the bagels taste so damn good. It reminded me of hearing of English beers brewed with water from the Thames, and now the two facts are inexorably linked in my head. Chalk up one for useless knowledge.

Harder to relate, and yet probably more worthwhile is to tell of visiting the footprints of the World Trade Center in New York. And yet there's been so much said about it already, seems right to let it rest.

I've been reading the World War II columns of Ernie Pyle of late. I had an interesting conversation the other day in which the idea of "too young" came up. I am not a fan of the those words, feeling that my generation's managed to extend our adolescent dependence as far as we can go - myself included. After all, were we living in the early 19th century, at 25 years old we'd be past middle aged - "too young" looks different from that perspective. So I tried to think of all the things one could be too young to be or do.
I've known one person who was too young to get married, but that was by virtue of maturity and choice, not years.
Known folks too young to drive. Or be on their own. Or do any of the reckless things adults do. Still seems more to do with mentality then with age.
But I kept thinking about Ernie Pyle tramping through North Africa, and thought of old classmates of mine who have been to Iraq and home again. And that was the one "too young" I couldn't argue with. I think soldiers of all ages, will probably always be too young to go off to war, their husbands and wives and children always too young to lose them. A soldier is always too young to die.

It's 2008, this new born year is mewling at our doorsteps. We are still at war. There's a empty patch of skyline in New York. The kids in Baltimore and the kids in the Rio Grande Valley are still hungry and in need of more than what teachers can give. Gas is high and so is milk. There seems to be a coming return of the Cold War complete with nukes, and we've no Harry Truman with us now.

But I've got this crazy kindle of hope in my chest - that things are going to change and change for the better. We really haven't got a choice about the matter, if we let the status quo remain than we're in for an apocolypse of our own making. It's no false hope either, this crazy little flame in my chest, I think that just as we humans can destroy ourselves, that we can also figure a way to rebuild.

The fact of the matter is that the responsibility for change lies not in the marble halls of congress, nor in the house on Pennsylvania Avenue. Change lies not in the halls of Justice, or the cubicles of the State Department, or the angled corners of the Pentagon. Change, and the capacity for it lies in our own hearts: We the people must call for it, must demand it. We the people must be the change we wish to see in this country and this world.

So Happy 2008. Heads up, friends, to the rising sun. Stand unafraid and tall. Fear not. Go well. Stay well. And hope always.