Tom’s Tidbits- What is there to hope for in 2024?

Greetings,

With the Holiday Season comes a look back at last year and a look forward to next. 2023 seemed like the latest in a string of difficult years but it seems crass to dwell on the bad, so I’d like to concentrate on the good and why we should hope for anything better in 2024.

For each individual, our feeling of a year can be most strongly colored by our personal experiences. The death of one family member or the birth of another, a crash in business or a success in school can define our whole year no matter what is happening in the larger world. I hope you and the people you care about personally experienced 2023 as the best year ever.

Looking beyond our personal lives things seem pretty challenging across the board. Maybe that’s just one perspective though, maybe there’s sun hiding behind the clouds. However, when I looked around for other opinions there weren’t a lot of stand-out things I’d missed. In US economics we’re better off than we could have been… inflation and unemployment are down, wages are rising slightly, and the Fed managed to prevent the recession everyone knew was coming. Most of the real accomplishments seemed to come from our friend Science. Medical advances blunted Covid (mRNA vaccines), reduced AIDS deaths to the lowest number of infections in decades (increased access), and threatened malaria, Alzheimer’s, and cancer (new vaccines and therapies). The world continues to burn from Climate Change but the COP meeting brought some encouragement as countries created a fund to compensate developing countries facing the worst of the disaster (though without enough funding to actually make a difference for them) and agreed on the need to eliminate fossil fuels (though without a plan to do so). Advances in technology could help build a greener world economy as EV sales hit their highest point so far, fusion power took great strides, and the EPA said it expects solar and wind to surpass coal by next year. There’s always something to be glad about if you look deeply enough.

But still, bleakness seems to taint everything. Medical advances are pointless unless people have access to them, the minimal efforts to fight Climate Change are anemic, and the technology that can rebuild our world is being fought at every turn by those who would rather profit until the planet dies. At home, our government seems on the verge of collapse as it struggles to apply civilized standards to the uncivilized, and worldwide we aren’t alone as democracy and human rights are showing cracks everywhere. The headline-grabbing conflicts in Ukraine and Israel are just the tip of the iceberg of more than 100 armed conflicts currently happening around the world, and many others are waiting to break out.

What’s waiting in 2024? There’s a list of things we could wish for… Rational, single-payer healthcare. Politicians who aren’t corrupt and accountability for those who are. A stable, well-funded government with equality of opportunity and representation for all. A strong economy that doesn’t only work for billionaires. Effective effort to save the planet. Active advocacy for peace. Maybe these and more could happen short of Utopia, but they’re so far from where we are now that they may as well be impossible. Wishing by itself only leads to disappointment.

Yet we should face the New Year with hope. Maybe things can seem bad now not because we’ve given up, but because we’re trying to do so much better. A status quo where groups are oppressed, corruption rules, and planet-ending threats are ignored can be quiet and orderly, but that kind of willful ignorance can’t last. I hate to use the word, but people at home and abroad are becoming ‘woke’. For the first time we’re admitting to problems that have always been there; a welcome enlightenment to the people who dealt with them for decades. We’re seeing how the issues relate, and we’re beginning to see the causes clearly. Maybe some of our pain comes from grappling with these problems instead of ignoring them, trying to find real solutions instead of placebos. Trial and error are frustrating, failure is painful, and we feel those things as a society as well as individuals.

So why hope? Because fewer people are relying on wishes and more are relying on themselves to make a difference, and the generations behind us are paying more attention than we ever did. The reason to hope in 2024, as it always has been and always will be, is ‘we the people’.

From all of us here at Tom Dwyer Automotive Services, I wish you the happiest of holiday seasons and a New Year where you find your own power to make the difference you want to see.

Make a great day,