2024: The Year of Chaos

This is going to be a difficult year in several dimensions. Therefore it is important to focus on what comforts you and gives you the kind of perspective that enables calm and contentment in small pleasures.

Mrs Rodin and I were gifted with a decorative container planted with Amaryllis bulbs. With a little bit of watering these bulbs are already pushing out shoots. In a few months Spring will return with new growth everywhere. The storms we get around here are entertaining so long as the windows and roof is watertight -- which our's is. All of the earthquakes are below sensation even if the graph records it. The neighbors are busily exchanging their hand-me-downs and engaged in volunteer work. Household chores still need doing, but nothing is completely falling apart.

I worry less for myself than I do for the younger generation. But it is easy to forget the resilience of youth even if they do not have the wisdom, yet, to avoid those things for which they require resilience. My emotions are kind of like a video currently going around the internets where a camera pans in a single shot from daylight to night. Both exist, it is you who chooses where to look.

I think a lot of bad things are going to happen this year. Some of it will have happened regardless of man's foolishness, but of a lot of it will happen because of man's foolishness. I am always in mind of the Robert Heinlein quote --

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.”

We are going to have a lot of "bad luck" this year. I suspect it will be worse than last year if, for no other reason, than a number of dramas were set in motion this past year and must meet their close this year -- if not a finale, at least a scene closure setting up the next scene. And these will be on top of new dramas that arise. There will likely be some happy surprises from my point of view, but far fewer than I would wish.

America, on average, has had a blessed existence. Some of it was by design, some of it was result of other peoples suffering more than us --

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. -- Leon Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I don't think there is a happy ending for America this year for the simple reason that there is no universal agreement on what a happy ending looks like and how to achieve it. If I were to guess, I think the schism will grow throughout the year. Whether we will break by the next time the ball drops in Times Square I do not know. I do know that your relative happiness will be determined by that upon which you focus.

You can't help America by going crazy. The enemies of America want you to go crazy. That is why they are seeding Chaos in as many places as possible. And if you think the Chaos is claiming you, stop and focus on a flower, a child, a sunlit scene, a soft breeze. Settle yourself. You must endure.