A Very Happy New Year!

Today for many is a day of recovery from hangovers. For me, it's feeling more like a day of reflection, or of hope, even. As hokey as that sounds.

I won't bore you with my personal aspirations for the coming year, nor my endless list of New Years resolutions. (I'm still pretty much 0-29 in sticking to my New Years resolutions anyway.) What I will say is that I hope this year finds us making strides forward with the world's problems. I hope we begin being honest with ourselves, about our good decisions, and our not-so-good decisions, our vices and our virtues (in no way meant to conjure parallels with the Taliban), and our strengths and our weaknesses. I also hope that we as Americans can begin to find an opportunity for peace. Let's hope the war ends this year, and let's hope that Iraq begins to find some stability. Let's hope that the Darfur situation begins to calm down finally. Let's hope that corporate leaders will begin to find ways to make health care more affordable and accessible. Let's hope that the forces of peace, equality, reason, and human compassion can finally make some headway against the pervasively dominant forces of fundamentalism, vengeance, intolerance, ignorance, and belligerence. (All of the latter negative qualities are made more dangerous when mixed with utter stupidity, which is unfortunately also rampant these days.)

But most of all, my New Year's wish for everyone--from heads-of-state to grassroots activists, from the consumer to the journalist--is for the rare, but priceless, attribute of objectivity to begin making a comeback.