When you were young and with others, you wanted to start a revolution.
But if you were young, but alone, you might want New Year Resolution e.g. diet, “biggest loser”, learning Spanish, pick up a new skill set.
Then when you have been around the block a few times, you still think of New Year resolution, but just micro ones e.g. jogging every other day, email your kids every other week.
We need to tell ourselves it’s not been OK. That there is room for improvement.
Never too late. For older guys, to meet someone new, even a new male friend, is a hassle: how much can I put trust in the guy even though he has been my friend’s friend? What does he want in exchange ?
In business, even with benefits spelled out in details, people still want to let it simmer. Fools rush in!
On a larger scale, consumer sentiment makes or breaks an economy already teetering on the brink. It’s been more than three long years.
We haven’t trusted ourselves enough. Nursing our wound feels safer than taking small risk.
Government gets bigger, but our paychecks smaller.
The skeptics have had a field day: they would never run out of materials for late night TV.
David Brook of the NYTimes noticed a trend in communitarianism in a small town near Baton Rouge. The kind acts were so real it could be surreal.
Neighbor actually lighted the candle at your loved one’s grave?
Makes me want to live there, to be a part of this “Utopian”.
(in fact, the main character in the story did just that, with their move from PA back to LA).
Right now, I am living in a city of roughly 9 Million. And tonight, there will be at least one tenth of the city gather near the river to watch the fireworks.
I am sure there have been small kind acts everyday (I helped a kid in a toy car roll up the stiff sidewalk just now).
Here, people are “white-skin envy” (mannequins in stores are all white).
If you found a black person, perhaps he/she is around 40 years old, fathered during of the Vietnam War. Other Africans who did not make the soccer team also decided to stay on but constitute a tiny portion.
I read somewhere that the greatness of a nation is in how it treats its weakest link (the US with its handicap law enactment is undeniably civilized). Nordic countries are way up there on this scale.
In the end, it’s our every-day act of kindness that adds up.
Let’s make this our micro resolution.
President Bush was sincere when he urged the nation to go about daily routine, such as shopping (right after 9/11). That resolution could be taken out of context. I would rather understand him as saying, let’s have our micro-resolution of many as answers to the macro-barbaric acts of a few. The key is togetherness. His dad’s adage was “a thousand points of lights”. Let 2012 be the year of our thousand micro resolutions.
Pay it forward!
Thang Nguyen 555 