How about a candle theme? That's hopeful.  Sort of "Candle in the Wind," y'know?  New Year Eye Opening Eve? New Year Watch Out for Big Brother Eve?  How do we communicate a sense of hopefulness when the news around us is so terribly bleak?  "Freedom: The Final Years" and "Change: Too little too late" and "New Year's Gimme Some"  Apparently the Chinese say the new year will be the year of the Ox...but I think it's more likely gonna be the year of a lotta bull.

Out of the mysts of hilarity came the theme: 2009: Year of the Open Hand....

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Mark said:

A Year to Rebuild... I ran across this the other day: Knowing what to expect can provide us with peace of mind, even in the midst of collapse. Wallowing in nostalgia over the good old days, or denying that sweeping changes are before us -- these responses are definitely unhealthy. If we know what's coming, we can start ignoring the things that we will not be able to rely on. If we do enough of this, we may find ourselves in a different world, quite possibly a better one, rather quickly. Here is a personal example. Some years ago, I decided to give up the car, finding it quite impractical, and started bicycling instead. It wasn't that easy at first, but once I got used to it, a strange thing happened to my perception: I started seeing cars quite differently. On the way to work in the morning, I would ride along a stretch of highway, which was always packed with cars. When you are driver, you see it as normal, because you are part of this herd of mechanized insects. But what I saw was sheet metal boxes with people imprisoned inside them, strapped down to a chair inside a tiny padded cell, and most of these poor crazies were just pictures of misery: an angry, desperate, lonely mob, condemned to move about in circles. And then I would happily pedal away, through a park and around a pond, and leave that horrible, dying world behind. And so it is with a great many things. We can wait until the lifestyle that is killing the planet and is making us crazy and sick is no longer physically possible, or we can opt out of it ahead of time. And what we replace it with can be difficult at first, but quite a lot better for us in the end. This is the positive ending to a long and scary description of The Five Stages of Collapse by a front row observer of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Read the whole thing when you feel strong. I don't agree with all of his analysis, but the bottom line is that our world will change next year as the dollar based financial system, and as much of our commercial system as rests upon it, and maybe even more collapses. It will be up to us to change it for the better by saying goodbye to those things we are better off without, and by rebuilding those institutions that we choose on more solid foundations.

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November 26, 2008
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