New Year's resolutions seem to be going out of style, and predictions are a dime-a-dozen this time of year. Nevertheless, I hope you'll take some time as 2003 closes the door on today's events and ambles off into the sitting room of history. Many of us get so busy with all the things we're doing that we lose sight of whether or not they actually matter.
A new year always reminds me of a clean slate. Our past remains a part of us, of course, but we can, for the most part, choose to let its tiny tyrannies walk off the stage of our present, acknowledge they are part of our history, and then focus our energy and attention on what lies ahead.
As to what that is, no one knows. I have the odd sense that even as our technology has grown more powerful, we as human beings are less in control of our future than in previous years. Perhaps this is a natural function of aging? Or is there a rising sense that events so much larger than each of us are gathering momentum and will soon bend our attention and efforts in their direction – whether we like it or not?
Computers, for instance, have finally reached the point of real usefulness to those of us in the researching and writing business. There are wonderful programs available for finding information, cataloging and storing it, then sifting through it as we attempt to add to the world's collection. What is less clear is how much of this information is of real value in our daily lives.
There is an assumption in our modern society that large amounts of information at our fingertips will yield good decisions – thus, our penchant for recording everything. Increasingly, I question that assumption. There are mounds of information everywhere I turn, yet there seems to be precious little wisdom or knowledge applied to sorting it all out. My first New Year's prediction is don't look to computers for any help on that one!
In predicting the future, most commentators look at present trends, then speculate what will happen if those trends continue out into the future. The real future, of course, is made by the trends that didn't continue as predicted. No doubt Saddam Hussein and Libya's Gadhafi had timetables predicting when they would acquire sufficient quantities of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons to "make a difference" in the world. What they failed to predict was the end of the age of appeasement as practiced by the Clinton administration would occur on Sept. 11, 2001.
Likewise, my few predictions for 2004 are based on the end, not the continuation, of various trends we've all become accustomed to. Here they are:
- The abortion battle will shift to the civil courts. There is growing evidence that medical practitioners involved in the abortion industry have performed medical procedures on women and girls who were not able to give their informed consent. The publication by the state of Texas of a booklet that doctors will be forced to give to potential abortion patients, which outlines the increased risks of breast cancer to the mother and fetal abnormalities to future children will bankrupt Planned Parenthood and make abortion providers uninsurable.
- One of the nation's less-grounded federal appeals courts will issue such an outrageous verdict in a case – which the Supreme Court will affirm by refusing to hear – that Congress will finally begin discussing impeachment for federal judges. Congress will rediscover its constitutional authority to put certain legislation beyond judicial review.
- Global anti-Semitism and anti-Christian attitudes will continue to grow, especially among American and European self-appointed "elites." Islam, despite its inherent and well-demonstrated penchant for violence, will increasingly be hailed by these crippled intellectuals as a "religion of peace."
- The mainline media, academia and the legal bar will continue to move leftward to counter what from their communal perspective is the "right-wing" reporting of FOX News, WorldNetDaily and other Internet news organizations that carry stories these organizations previously shielded from the public.
- 2004 will be the most uncivil and divisive election campaign in living memory, and the McCain-Feingold campaign "finance reform" law will be repealed after the election.
- The economy will continue to improve, tax-receipts will rise, the deficit will fall and Democrats will continue to promise "rollback" of the investment-related tax cuts to business and industry that revived the economy, until after the 2004 election.
Have a happy and blessed New Year.