It’s hard to mourn the passage of 2009. Jobless friends struggled to survive while our own family income took a dive. Gay friends watched meanness triumph over decency in equality battles. Friends of many stripes lamented choices made by the president we elected with unrealistically high hopes. And my hometown paper this morning lists, among the top stories of the year, teenage gang rape, government insolvency and a bunch of senseless killings.
Other front pages aren’t much different: my second-favorite city winds up the year in the red and worried about the shadow of 9/11 (New York Times.) Murder and assault — specifically assault compounded by injustice — are among today’s concerns in Chicago. And a couple of other former hometown papers lead off the year’s last day with stories of car crashes, shootouts (Atlanta Journal Constitution) and a tragic, child-abandoning, now dead, alcoholic mom (Richmond Times-Dispatch). Plus another doozy about four or five hundred dead animals found in one house — and that happened in Philadelphia.
Optimism, these days, is a full-time job.
But hey. We’re inching toward health reform. Umar’s bomb didn’t go off. Some of those bad guys (above) went to jail, and a few good guys who’d been jailed as bad guys for a very long time got out of jail thanks to the Innocence Project. And even if the best we can do for employment optimism is note that the rate of jobs lost is getting smaller — can the country’s jobless find hope in that? — the jobless recovery seems to be happening. Surely jobs will follow.
Plus: even if we don’t like all of his choices and decisions, we have an articulate president who comes across, still, as thoughtful and decent — and doesn’t make you cringe when you see him on TV. There’s hope.
And True/Slant, which you’d never heard of this time last year, is closing in on a million readers.
Happy New Year from the Boomers and Beyond page.