The New Year gets off to a great start with Sunday and Monday as holidays and nothing but sunny days as far ahead as anyone can pretend to see.
So let’s climb to the top of Dec. 31, 2011 and peer into 2012.
Start on a cheery note: the sound of the year is musical: twenty-twelve. Two t’s make it alliterative. Twelve has a bell-like ring. Twenty and plenty rhyme. Twenty-twelve is bound to be a good year, a fun year.
On the other hand, 2012 will be a pounding political year. Remember that earplugs work and TVs have off-on switches.
The first half of political 2012 will belong to the Republicans who will nominate Mitt Romney. Mr. Romney will have it sewed up in the spring because so many of the primaries are early this election. He will win because he is best qualified by character (which deserves first place), experience, temperament (which is kinda like character, but not quite) and a long string of outstanding successes in business, government and the art of living.
Newt Gingrich will come in second, but be defeated because of character, experience, temperament and a long string of failures in the art of living.
Whether Mr. Romney defeats President Obama will depend on whether the economic outlook looks bright or grim come fall. Direction will make all the difference. Unemployment will continue to be much higher than it has been for most of the years since 1950, but if the number of workers without work continues to fall and the total is closer to 8 percent than 9 percent by November, Obama may sneak by.
Europe, the Middle East and Asia will make a difference.
My prediction is that Europe will avoid collapse and begin recovery. It will because it must in order to avoid another dark age and rational people summon up the determination and will to avoid avoidable pain.
One cannot be so sanguine about the Middle East, which is, after all, where Iraq, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are. One or all of the above are perfectly capable of turning the world on its ear, starting a horrible new war and/or wrecking economies all over the globe with $200-a-barrel oil, or higher.
Japan, China, South Korea and Indonesia are much more civilized, much more likely to focus on making money than they are to throw monkey wrenches into things that work.
MY MOST SUNNY prediction is that mankind will continue to become less violent, crime will continue to decrease, the East’s war on women will subside and a new respect for human rights will bloom.
When the Lynn family moved to Bowie, Texas from Humboldt in 1958, one of the major expenditures we made was to build a bomb shelter that could be reached from our kitchen. It was an irrational thing to do. If the Cuban missile crisis had become a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and a poisonous nuclear cloud had swept over Bowie, our shelter would have been worthless.
But the point is that nuclear war was widely predicted for years after World War II. Perhaps that was because so many adults could remember World Wars I and II and had little confidence that humans were smart enough to avoid World War III. Those predictions have become less and less frequent, just as the wars that did erupt were far less lethal. The world is a safer place today for most of its 7 billion inhabitants and is becoming safer from violence, from disease, from starvation as each year rolls by.
War still commands more headlines than, say, progress against cancer, heart disease and hunger does, but the happy fact is that the armies of intelligent, diligent men and women working against mankind’s enemies are winning their battles and making this old globe a better place to live as each day passes into history.
