THIS YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

This time, I do have one! But...I'm keeping it to myself. I'll tell you next year how successful I was with it. Perhaps a bit more fun is addressing—

LAST YEAR'S PREDICTIONS:

We will all continue to be who we are. But tomorrow we'll be doing it for a day longer.

Yay! I got one right!

Spinach production will drop. Fruit harvests will shrink. Oceans will rise. Tortilla sales will rise.

Honestly, I haven't looked up the Spinach figures. I think I was making a point about raids. Of which, sadly, I was right.

Oceans are rising. But of course that was too easy a prediction. I think that was my way of saying some things do not change, even when they do not stay the same. Or that we'd continue to ignore, as a nation, the ever-swelling stack of reports and realizations that global warming is having consequences upon our earth that may very well prove deleterious to our living here as we currently do. Or...both of those things.

Another big hurricane hits somewhere near Katrinaville, convincing some people that Global Warming may be a topic we should consider in a decade or so.

I'm very happy to be very wrong on this one.

The level of Benzene in the air in Eugene, OR will not decrease.

It's interesting to track this issue in the UMX blog. First mentioned here, in Octubre de 2006, and then again in my new year's post of last year. How...pleasing, how fitting, that I won the MTV vlogger gig featuring this very issue.

People will continue to ignore the fact that the way so many of us live is killing so many others. And ourselves. Others will blog about it. Yet others will get mad that many of us point these things out. And others will not be part of the discussion because they don't have Internet. But they will keep breathing the air around them.

Sometimes my predictions don't seem very fun. Odd.

Democrats will launch a blitz of investigations, not playing it safe as the Right undeservedly hopes.

Oof. That sort of hurts. If a tall building were Wrongness, that prediction just buried me in rubble. Somewhere underneath it lies truth. I'm not very confident in the Democrats uncovering it.

Bush will reveal what some Americans still don't know: that he is not a President, but a dictator in his own mind. We will see this when Democrats try to hold him responsible for...anything. He is going to be the one to force the dreaded (needed) "Constitutional Crisis." He'll rush headlong into it. He craves it. Just as Hitler craved destruction for its own sake, Bush craves the exercise of power despite the setting or players or issue.

I guess I don't need to add much to this.

Bush's drug and alcohol use and public intoxication/tranquilization will become harder and harder to ignore as his bubbledream falls apart (well, as he is finally forced to realize it is falling apart). We'll get to see some really historic moments on TV. Or on Youtube, for those of us who don't have TV.

Well, I've seen him slur during a few pressers to such a degree that I was left with zero doubt that he was stoned on pills. But his handlers did well. Except for that one time he completely unprecedentedly ditched his schedule oddly after saying some very stilted and weird things to cut off his presser short (while clearly wasted, and sorry, no link right now just memory that cannot be deleted by any site or ISP), there was nothing of the meltdown I was imagining. So I would say I was wrong on this one. But I'll double down for '08. I can't help it. I should have left my prediction-purse at home, I guess.

Americans will continue to self-educate, using the Internet.

I must be psychic. I was TOTALLY right on that one.

More and more people will learn real history. More and more military AWOL and speaking out will make its way into the news. The forces of resistance to American hegemony and imperialism will grow louder.

Pretty broad. Hard to be wrong on something like this. But I was right on the AWOL/military resistance thing. Again, not hard if you remember anything about Vietnam days, or of reading of them. Our "Press" is, however, (and of course) stepping on these stories fiercely.

Those using the same tired old (Neoliberal and typically Western) frameworks and formulas to think up "answers" to all the problems that have been spawned by those same modes of thinking will sound increasingly more ridiculous and irrelevant in the face of the obvious underlying and burgeoning Western symptomology.

You know what? I'm really pleased to say that I've noticed a few prominent voices out there actually beginning to tear away some of the fat of our tired reasoning shapes, and peer underneath, or extrapolate larger (all in my very unhumble opinion por supuesto) and that is VERY encouraging to note. I think on one hand, this has been forced by the blatant and extreme corruption and failure of so many elements in our Same Old Storylines. On the other, I hope that some of us out here have yanked the Overton Window a bit to the left (or just wider open). Not so important why it's happening...But I'm glad to see it.

But the powers that be (and this doesn't just mean Washington) will sense the growing awareness and pressure to change behaviors that normally (without the Internet) the People would not know about or be interested in, and will lash back in various ways. Entrenched systems, like cornered animals, never go quietly.

Uh-oh, he's getting poetical on us. Although it's true that the bite of an entrenched system is even deadlier than that of a rabid dog. So much harder to treat. (And you can't throw a steak at it to get it away from you, tho I've seen some try).

War with Iran. (Oh boy do I hope I'm wrong on that one).

And I'm glad you were.

Finally, as I have predicted the last two "hot" colors (Acid Green and Mandarin Orange) to sweep our culture, I predict that a Raspberry-tint is the next fluorescent highlight to take the stage.

I haven't been following fashion, but aside from some blogs I have created for others (and of course that's not fair, fulfulling your own predictions and then claiming you sensed it coming!), I haven't noticed a vast sweep of the color. Seen it here and there, but no more than can be warranted by my looking specifically for it, and thus finding more instances of the color. Orange is still big, and so is (one of my old faves) "Leaf Green," which burst up big in about '96 or '97. (Some have been known to call it "Joaquín Green," although maybe that was only me, on second thought.) So I think we must be between "hot colors." But I still say when the next one comes it will be the hot raspberry. Tho the image of an icy blue becoming trendy is suddenly impinging on my mind. DON'T TRUST IT! I mean, if you want, you can. A sense of intuition and gut is an extremely useful tool...when not polluted by being channeled through the mind of a psychopathic idiot pretending to be King of America. Just sayin', ya know. In general. Don't launch a war based on the feeling that Icy Blue is on the horizon, and we're good. Chido?

NEXT YEAR'S PREDICTIONS

Ay dios mio. I must be wiser. Because I don't feel too confident listing any this time. I mean...I could easily get cynical and predict that the worst in us wins out for another year...but oddly, even in the midst of this wintery cold, I feel some sort of hope for many things ahead. In 2008. As ugly as so many things are around us, I have this sense that there is a rising up of change. And I don't mean GO DEMOCRATS! Nah, nah. I feel something bigger. Maybe the Dems can be a part of that, if they choose. But I think that change is coming with or without them. And maybe that's why I feel a disproportionate sense of hope. Because it is not reliant upon something so unreliable as a political party. (Especially one as unreliable as that one.) But instead, attached to something much truer and older, and deeper. And common.

REGRETS:

I am not saying if I could go back, I wouldn't do a couple things differently. But unlike Greebey Vather, I cannot travel through time. And I find myself today with no feeling of "regret" in me.

HOPES:

That I feel the same way next year, this time.

GOALS for 2008:

I want to do better at sending people cards and stuff. I still have a bunch on the top of the fridge in envelopes and addressed, waiting for me to write in them. They have been there since we moved here. In the summer. This is something I can change, dammit. (And a bit less ambitious than last year's goals: read more books, get more sun, get better at spanish, write my family more AND travel to and live in Califas, whoa.)

GRACIAS

To the creative forces that be for keeping me on this part of the plane for now. I'm diggin' it. And I'm still in pretty good shape, as far as animals go. For now. Gracias for that.

And thanks to all of you, the readers and commenters that make The Unapologetic Mexican so very damn fun and intelligent and so pinche Web 2.0. I hope to see ustedes next year, so we can keep sharing the times and energía that we do. Gracias for joining me en la lucha as well as la risa.

Enjoy your evening and the changing of the year on this calendar that, for now, we share.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo!