What's in Store for 2009?

With temperatures well below freezing last night, winds howling, and treacherous icy roads, our plans for New Year's Eve were canceled. My husband and I stayed home instead. I stopped by the grocery store on the way home from work (it took almost two hours to drive an ordinarily forty minute commute in the snow and ice) and treated us to fresh lobsters that were on sale, steamed vegetables, a Maytag blue cheese, and popcorn for later in the evening. Our daughter joined us for dinner before she left to party with a few friends from high school who were home from college.

After dinner, with the cat on the couch between us, my husband and I watched two movies, neither notable, spoke with other friends who were home keeping warm and safe, and lasted until midnight to watch the ball come down in Times Square.

And now it's 2009!

For humor, watch talkingpointsmemo.com's Golden Duke Awards for the worst of the political arena, and there were many candidates for those awards this year. Or you can read them instead.

For humor with the charm of Rachel Maddow, watch her New Year's Eve special that also features her first annual awards for the most ridiculous in 2008.

And now with a twinkle in our eyes, we have to face the reality of 2009. Nassau County, the richest county in New York State, is the subject of an editorial in the December 31st issue of the New York Times on the new homeless: the same people who once donated food to local charities are now clients.

Also in the New York Times, is a series called The Debt Trap, which is required reading if we are going to fully understand how unrestricted and unprincipled access to credit has created this turmoil. The most recent issue explores how a student attending college can be lured into signing up for a credit card that pays a commission to the host college. The commission gets bigger if there is a trailing balance! Earlier articles in the series detailed how lax lending policies provided so many credit cards that too many Americans spent most of their free time juggling the obligations, until a medical emergency or a lost job, brought the whole house of cards tumbling down.

One of the first acts of this new Congress has to be an examination of debt and consequently, credit, and a review of the bankruptcy laws so that more Americans can get relief from their credit card debt. For a good review of the financial meltdown, go to ProPublica.org, which just lost some of its funding to the Bernie Madoff scandal when the JEHT Foundation lost its funding to the ponzi scheme.

When we look at the worst of the political scandals--ProPublica.org says that 21 members of the 109 Congress were under investigation--Ted Stevens in Alaska, Rod Blagojevich in Illinois in the continuing saga of the appointment of a replacement senator for Barack Obama, Charles Rangel milking the rent control system in Manhattan and forgetting to disclose income, or just the raw, unrestrained lying of Sarah Palin as she exploded onto the national scene--we look to our newly elected president and hope that his temperment, presence, and intelligence will provide leadership to bring us out of this mess.

With George W. Bush sulking someplace in these waning weeks of his administration, we see what the failure of leadership can bring: two wars, a collapsed financial system, a federal government in disarray, a bailout system that can't guarantee that the funds taxpayers are giving to banks and corporations aren't being spent on bonuses to unworthy executives, Guantanamo Bay where this country has abandoned its principles and engaged in torture, enhanced interrogations, and stripped detainees of basic human rights, and our car makers tottering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Barack Obama speaks about the steadfastness of our national character, deeply rooted in our tradition of arts, poetry, literature, and music. Hopefully our local and national arts organizations will not disappear in the financial crisis, but will sustain us spiritually as we find solutions to these profound problems. Hopefully our public education system will not be starved, and instead we will revitalize our country by investing in our children's futures. Hopefully a reorganized health care system will also invest in these children with preventative care and not direct all of our resources to the elderly. Hopefully we will join together as Americans, the great melting pot, and lend a hand to each other locally.

We can't put too much on the shoulders of the skinny kid from Illinois.