Rearview

How will you remember 2011? Maybe it will be, as Time magazine suggested, the year of the activist. I tend to look at the empty half of the glass, so while I see all the things that have changed across the globe, I wonder where the change is for our neighborhood.
Osama bin Laden: not an issue anymore. Muammar Gaddafi: ditto. The vacuum their terminations have generated continue to swirl. The vortex of the Middle East began in Arab Spring, but continue on through the Winter of Discontent. The troops came home from Iraq, but stayed in Afghanistan. Plans for a family trip to the cradle of civilization are still on hold while things get sorted out. Perhaps in another thousand years or so.
That should give the radiation in Japan a chance to settle down enough to make it a little more tourist-friendly, though with all the earthquakes and extreme weather charging around the planet this year, I feel a little more comfortable hanging around the continental United States, where the scariest natural phenomenon continues to be Charlie Sheen. Can someone please explain how this guy got another job on another sitcom? If you said "The Lindsay Lohan Defense," then you can move your piece around the board six more spaces to land on the Compare and Contrast square to discuss Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Wiener.
Roll the dice again and you might come full circle to the Occupy Movement. The winter weather has dampened the resolve of those who weren't moved by the tear gas or pepper spray. As part of that ninety-nine percent I'm stuck scratching my head while, in spite of all the signs and tents T-shirts by Jay-Z, corporations like General Motors and Master Card continue to make record profits. Maybe regime change in a world run by corporations is a little more difficult than we had imagined. To that end, maybe I should leave the last words to a great imagination that ended this year: "Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow." See you in 2012.