What will become of the illegal immigrants? I don't think they'll evaporate in 2009. They still want to come here, to send home paper dollars that may no longer be legal tender by the end of 2009.
Will Bush and Cheney receive punishment for their heinous crimes, for shredding the Constitution and Geneva Conventions? Again, billions would be spent while our mainstream media, totally infatuated with yellow publicity, will focus on nothing else, as with the impeachment hearings of 1999?
Will the U.S. have universal health care? Will Teddy Kennedy be alive? Will Caroline Kennedy inherit his senatorial torch?
Will the bread lines of the 1930s recur, so that great artists can produce more photography and other imaging?
Indeed, there is lots to look forward to, or maybe, better, anticipate, I say to myself, standing at the top of a metaphorical hill, like Moses, only seeing below no land of milk and honey. Instead I may see Guernica or the like, and be permitted to live on.
That Moses is actually Obama, not I.
Most awful of all, will we look back nostalgically to the Bush II years even as we blame him for this cesspool he's left as his legacy? Even as we, the second and third and fourth estates, descend into further ruin while the haves and have mores buy cheaper champagne and sell one or two of their many lavish estates?
Don't be so quick to throw a shoe at 2008. It's given us this powerful reality and metaphor, one of the highlights of the year. It's given us Obama & co., a political triumph the Election Integrity movement can celebrate along with most others.
It rescued us from the even worse ruin that McCain would certainly have wrought.
The first black president was elected, so that MLK must be resting in peace instead of rolling over in his grave.
But probably not.
2008 showed us that Americans have more intelligence than is normally credited to them, that they are not terminally self-destructive.
It may not be too late for some amount of economic recovery, some amount of increasing taxes on the rich, some amount of more widespread health benefits.
But let me assure you, the devil is more likely to be struck by lightning than for such amelioration to even begin in 2009. I hope I'm wrong.
May we jump to 2010? Write off 2009 altogether? 2010 may witness some turnaround.
Baby New Year 2009 may have progeria.
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