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Thursday, January 1, 2009
Tighten your chin straps, fellas…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s time for New Years Day football (well, it will be as soon as my wife finishes watching the Rose Bowl parade).
At one, it’s Georgia vs. Michigan State, with the Dawgs favored by seven and a half…. I’d take the Dawgs if I were betting, but I’ll probably root mildly for the Spartans (I’ve become a bit of a Ga. Tech fan the past few years — the underdog thing, I suppose).
And this afternoon at 5 p.m., the BCS* national championship game at the Rose Bowl pitting Penn State against USC, with USC favored by nine and a half. I’m taking my Nittany Lions of course (but only if you’ll give me the points … mama didn’t raise no fools).
* (Bookman Championship Series)
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G’bye, 2008; hello, something better?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Break out the new calendar, we’re starting over. And it’s about time, in a couple of meanings of the term.
It’s about time in the literal sense, in the sense that time is a stream that carries us along in its current, each moment flowing seamlessly into the next. It is we humans who have insisted on trying to measure the flow by units, breaking time into arbitrary, discrete components of days and hours and years so we might try to organize it better, at least in our minds.
So today is said to mark a new year, an artificial distinction that nonetheless wields a certain magic. The changing of the calendar has long been thought a time for renewal, for starting over, for improvement.
Back in the old days, we used to say we were turning the page or turning over a new leaf or even starting with a clean slate, metaphors linked to the technologies of a now passing age.
In the 21st century, we instead hit the reset button. We empty the cache. Reboot. We pull the plug and wait 10 seconds before restarting, which sort of describes what many of us have been doing since Christmas Eve.
Now it’s almost time to put the plug back into the wall and go to work. Forget 2008 and look to the future, a message that is more compelling on this particular Jan. 1 than on most.
In that sense too, it’s about damn time.
And no, starting over doesn’t mean wishing we could go back a year, to the days when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was still above 13,000 and the economy seemed strong.
If only we knew then what we know today, we tell ourselves, before trillions of dollars disappeared in the crash. But the truth is, foreknowledge wouldn’t have made much difference.
If we had known a year ago the market would plummet and the economy would go into deep recession, we all would have tried to get out of the market even sooner and as a result the DJIA would probably be right where it is today, struggling to stay above 8,000.
In that respect and many others, hindsight is vastly overrated. Things that have been set into motion by so many factors over such a long period of time become inevitable, and a year ago was already too late to change the course of things.
Besides, it no longer matters what the Dow Jones average was a year ago. What matters is what it will be a year in the future.
How many of us will have good jobs a year from now, how will the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look, how much confidence will the American people have recovered?
Looking backward gets us nowhere. What we do in the next year creates the new set of circumstances that in time creates events that come to seem inevitable.
That’s true in politics as well. In less than three weeks, the Bush administration will become fodder for history, and we should all hope it fares better among the historians than it has among those who have experienced it in real time.
A better verdict from historians would mean that things that look bleak today won’t look so bleak a decade from now, and we should all hope for that.
A new administration will take office Jan. 20, promising more than just a change in the calendar. Barack Obama assumes responsibility under circumstances more threatening than those faced by all but a handful of previous presidents.
The American people have invested a lot of faith in Obama. In recent polls, 80 percent say they have some or a lot of confidence in his ability to deal with the economy, and given present circumstances that’s extraordinary. But we cannot look back and hope that Obama or anyone else can restore what used to be.
The Dow at 13,000, home values doubling every 10 years, easy credit —- that world is gone. Time flows only in one direction, and what was can never be again.
But if we can’t make things as good as they were yesterday, we can make things better tomorrow than they are today. This —- the world as it exists today, Jan. 1, 2009 —- is the new starting point.
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