Please.  Let this year end.  I am so tired of bad news.  I like to think I am a news junkie, but I can’t really listen since the election.  The radio is on, but I can’t make my brain comprehend or focus.  It is easier to just say everything is fubar and go on with my day.  But, you simply can’t escape it.  My company is ending the year in a situation worse than it has seen in a decade.  I’m not concerned about my position, yet, but there will be changes and possible cut backs.  Couple this news with the report that the unemployment rate is at 7% or the figure of 10 million people out of work (the most ever in total numbers, although not as great of percentage) and no wonder there is a general sense of trepidation.

Then Israel had to start this new phase in the never-ending war.  Do I understand why they’re bombing Gaza?  Of course and I respect their right to defend themselves.  Hamas bombing Israeli territory gives them that right.  Yet, I can’t help but feel for the Palestinians.  I see their side, too.  Everyone thinks that the war is over and settled; it has never been over for them.  Shoved in a corner with barriers to independence and economic stability, who wouldn’t still hold a grudge? But, they haven’t helped their cause with their methods.  This, I’m afraid, will end up just being another sad chapter, deepening the divisions and exacerbating the age old problems, adding more causes to feud about ages hence.

This latest crisis is just one more thing.  Long ago I shed my Christian faith, but I can’t stop thinking “wars and rumors of wars” or noticing the fires or earthquakes or disease.  Everything seems to add up to what a guy alone on island wrote nearly 2,000 years ago.  Scrolling through channels over the weekend, I came upon A Distant Thunder.  This was a film shown in the 70’s to scare people to Christ, including us little kids.  I paused to watch and relive my childhood.  My husband nudged me and nodded at the boy.  Right.  No reason to scare him, or scar him perhaps.  The brief little moment brought back lots of memories – backward masking and demons on album covers.  Ah, that time of innocence when Satan was everywhere and everyone was on the lookout for the antichrist.  We never had anyone possessed by a devil in my evangelical church, but we heard about it from the visiting preachers as they told of their battles with the demons.  Come out!  People were healed of all manner of things by a guy in a bad wig and a blue polyester suit on the UHF stations late at night.  We went from faith healers on TV to the doctrine of prosperity – “Got wants you to be rich!”  Now, it seems we are cycling back to that fearful time.  Oh! Ok, now  I get why people are thinking Obama is the antichrist.

Is it bad that I have a song in my head – Tom Wait’s Chocolate Jesus? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wfamPW3Eaw

We all have a lot of hopes pinned on Obama.  He isn’t the antichrist and he’s not our chocolate Jesus either.  He’s no messiah.  Things are still going to be bad 1/21/09 and it is probably going to get worse before it  gets better and it is going to require us all to do something to make it better.  The low numbers from retailers this holiday season seems to indicate that maybe we are starting to get that.  (The discussion of why we should spend now to save the economy and then save later is a discussion for another day.)

It is going to get better, though.  I do believe that.  Normally at year’s end I wax nostalgic and get teary at Auld Lang Syne.  This year I can hardly wait for the clock to turn over, close the books on 2008 and start fresh.  I am ready to go to work.