It has become a tradition of Yours Truly in the waning hours of the year to look back on the past twelve months. I don’t know how many individual personal record keepers incorporate this as a practice, but this is when I like to recollect and analyze where we and the World has been in the pages of what has been recorded in my personal tome known as Journal Volume 48. If the old saying “the more things change the more they stay the same” holds true then this was the year that the reverse of that concept emerged as apparent; “the more things stay the same, the more they change.” On a personal level it was overall a decided mix of each seeing that much changed while much stayed the same. It perhaps is the gold in one’s Golden Age but though little was altered in terms of personal lifestyle, there was much leveling up in terms of relationship with community and commitment to service to humanity on both a local and global level. Such was the case in the life of this humble blogger. All self-reflection aside, the World we all share continued to turn while those of us riding on it celebrated winners and losers that generated both good and bad with some mixed in indifference. As the hours and minutes of 2022 tick away, it is time to have a look back at where we’ve been in the past twelve months.
The new year of 2022 found us in a World that was still emerging from the Covid-19 Pandemic and with some 60,000 Americans dying from the disease in January. Getting vaccines and boosters distributed did much to reduce the number of fatalities to the point that by April just about all of America and a decided majority of those living in it were back to pre-Pandemic conduct and public behavior. As if natural maladies were not enough to contend with, in February the World watched in horror as Vladimir Putin flexed his Russian military might and invaded his smaller neighbor, Ukraine. At the ten-month mark of that ill-advised exercise in belligerence, Putin is no closer to accomplishing his goal of invading and overtaking that nation than he was on February 23rd.
In May it was road trip time for Yours Truly. I drove the path of Old Route 66 out to California and back driving on those ultra-mod Interstates where in a few places the speed limit was 80 and 85 mph. The trip course was rerouted in the Mojave Desert by GPS due to construction and wildfires in places in California prohibiting travel north. That trip took me places I had never been before. Severe weather was its usual ever-present self throughout the year. The flooding in Kentucky and elsewhere along with the usual tornadoes commanded a lot of attention. The severe heat seemed to be ever increasing. Such is the tradeoff for failing to adequately address climate change. Later in the year many places were not spared the brutality of an early winter with record snowfall in several locales in the Northeast. These extremes in temperature can be distracting. There is still a difference between weather phenomena and climate change.
Although the American body politic remains rife with bitter division and ideological tribalism, there are signs we are finally moving on from the sensationalism and extremism that commanded center stage under the administration of the 45th President and his cult of personality. On Election Day, a decided majority of voters denied the bid for giving access to the levers of government to several candidates who were his hand-picked election deniers in key swing states. That sent a clear and clarion message to all the conspiracy theorists pushing the stolen 2020 election meme to stop it. The GOP long game strategy for packing the Supreme Court with conservative ideologs finally paid off for them on June 24th when Roe v Wade was finally overturned. Much to their chagrin, Pro-Life Conservatives has been playing defense on the issue of reproductive rights ever since. As it was accurately predicted even on this blog, the GOP did manage to win a small majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Their failure to win enough seats to consider a mandate and their inability to win the Senate was very telling about the unpopularity of what they are selling, mainly extremist candidates.
As is almost tradition at this time, we must acknowledge some of those we lost this past year. To say the Grim Reaper has held a greater field day than usual cannot be overstated. From Queen Elizabeth II to several personal friends and associates and so many in between, 2022 has been the natural end of life for so many who have walked this Earth with us. There are simply too many to list this time so see the link below:
NOTABLE PEOPLE WHO DIED IN 2022
Back to the personal life of a humble blogger. As it may have been indicated or alluded to in certain past posts on this blog, Yours Truly is now a 4th year member of Rotary International. My local club, Rotary Club of Tulsa Will Rogers, elected me as its President for this Rotary year which began July 1st. Life since has exemplified the very concept, “the more things stay the same, the more they change.” Since becoming a club president my lifestyle has not really changed at all in terms of my own daily activity and degree of volunteerism, but what has changed is it gets noticed a little more now. As it turns out, serving a greater good by immersing oneself in the service of others will lead to involvement in endeavors which will get noticed by ever more people. Earlier this month at a Rotary sponsored supply warehouse along Old Route 66, I with a few other Rotarians and a few volunteer expatriate Ukrainians packed a shipping container with medical supplies bound from Ukraine. This proactive and tangible assistance to the besieged people of that nation was something that caught the eye of a reporter from the local newspaper.
For better or worse, we will be living in another year at one minute after midnight tonight. We can take heart despite the negatives we have endured in the past fifty-two weeks. Even though our losses still hurt and we may still be smarting from navigating through some tough times, the knowledge that many forces working to make the World a better place contributes much palliating the pain. I’m not sure anyone truly appreciates the value of daily record keeping until they actually do it. I have met few individuals who have maintained a continuous written record of their own human experience longer than I have. As the sun sets on this last evening of a busy and strife-ridden year, we all have occasion to hold up our heads and smile with the knowledge we have survived another one. This evening’s journal entry will be #365 of Volume 48. Life can be ugly, but living can be beautiful. It is my hope that when read in 100 years the record I have kept showcases the kindness and humanity of my friends and fellow kindred spirits with whom I had the privilege to associate in the year 2022 CE. At the stroke of midnight let us drink a cup of kindness yet for the sake of auld lang syne.
Happy New Year, Stan! 🙂 Hang tough, Cuz! 😉