NEW YEAR, OLD NEWS

It's a New Year, we've got a New President, and things should be looking fresh and promising, no? Au Contraire. If you listen seriously to the news you would think THE END IS NEAR. Where is that old guy holding the sign? Well, let's see. It's not an old guy with a long beard and a wild look in his eye anymore, its a whole raft of plastic-looking people blabbing away on the TV, assuring us that things have never been this bad, but Help is on the Way, just wait, while the Government figures it out.

Not a wrinkle anywhere, not one hair out of place, teeth all sparkly white, lined up like chiclets, the men dressed in $3,000 suits, the women, from 18 to 80 with the same straight cookie-cutter hair style; these people look like adult-sized Barbie and Kens instead of real life reporters and/or jounalists.

So I'm going to believe these Salespeople (selling us their world view) who are doing their daily theater, complete with make-up and costumes, reading whatever some highly paid script-writer has put together for maximum effect on their audience? I don't think so.

So I'm going to color my life with their predictions and parade of experts and pundits either pummeling those with opposing views or praising their fraternity brother? So I'm going to let them scare the pee out of me so that I feel helpless in the face of impending doom, with only "them" to save me? I don't think so.

I've got a LIFE, and if I'm smart, it doesn't include them to any great extent. It includes my friends, my family, my business, the mountain at sunrise, the river that runs through my town. These things are here now, close at hand which I can feel and touch and relate to, not on a flat screen, but in full color, real life, three dimensions. The whole gamut is right here--in the present--with people who do have wrinkles, pimples, crooked teeth and bad hair-cuts, and forget to put the toilet seat down. That is what is real for me.

It is good enough. Whether the sky falls or not.