My Birthday is during Christmas week, so over the decades, the entire seven days has become a winter celebration of all things that change; a chance for hope and reflection around the change of the year, and the Winter Solstice. It must be my ancient Welsh Druid DNA cropping up on a yearly basis.
I appear to spend a lot of time reading the same articles on what happened during the previous 12 months, and slapping my forehead in frustration that I never ‘saw that coming’. The media run this ”We-are-smarter-than-you” exercise annually because it’s a time saver. In early December, with Christmas breaks coming up, no time to properly research upcoming stories, and the movers and shakers of the world taking time off from the spotlight, they are not in a position to grab a press release, or visit a press conference, then parrot back what was said, and treat it like news instead of what it really is: Propaganda from one point of view.
Of course, if a blogger does not join in the party and do the same thing, it appears that they haven’t learned any journalism tricks, so in order to join the crowd, here comes another “Best and Worst” column. Let’s do something different, shall we? As I turn a year older at the same time as all of this regurgitation of past work takes place, I like to look to the year ahead, and see what knock-on effects the shepherded news stories of the last 12 months will provide: Those items of interest that the powers-that-be have deemed us intelligent and emotionally steady enough to receive and take in. As most of the real news is still buried, let’s turn this on its head. Predict what will happen in 2009, and then return 12 months from now with all of the excuses why it didn’t. Have fun:
There will be a new Britney Spears-type ‘heroine’, because the current one is wising up about how bored little girls have become with grown up angst. Another real life tragedy based on the simple premise that you CAN get what you want, but the price is ALWAYS higher than you think. In fact, it’s the same Morality tale that has been told to us for centuries. Most of us may not have a church in our lives to continually tell us this, but that gap has been filled by the media.
The much ballyhooed exotic and ‘green’ travel industries will die this year. There may still be a few hardy soles (or those whose bank accounts are still hardy), that are able to cruise to Antarctica, or hike through a pristine Latin-American rain forest, but not enough to keep the industry afloat. Thanks for the memories.
Your savings will be worth less in January 2010, than they are now. This American created debt crisis, that they somehow have got the rest of the globe to pay for will be dragging on until the Winter Olympics in Russia, not Canada. That’s 2014 for those of you not keeping count.
Secondary education will get more governmental money, because more kids will want to stay in school now that their parents can’t afford a ‘gap year’ exotic excursion.
Oil at $150 per gallon by next November: We didn’t stop institutional investors bidding the price up during holiday seasons in 2008, we won’t in 2009. There’s too much money to be made by some.
GM and Chrysler will either merge, or announce plans to. They are just too big, old, and greedy to survive. Thousands will be on their final pay check, and the Franchising industries will pick them up. Boom times for local shopping malls as new, hungry, specialized industries aggressively search for market share in your neighborhood.
President Obama will make bold claims and plans, have most of them thrown back at him, survive an assassination attempt, and change the Middle East political landscape forever.
Bernie Madoff is just the beginning. There will be a slow-burn of investment house malfeasance brought to light that shows that most of the large scale banking and investment industry is more crooked than Enron.
Union power will grow as everyone realizes that they need a long term job in one corporation for a long time, like their parents did. Who needs new ideas and skills sets when you can get vacation and a pension?
We will still import dangerous and shoddy goods from China. They will still continue to buy foreign currencies to ensure they have an ongoing fuel supply. Wal-Mart will not change, and get even bigger.
An Assassination attempt on Ex-President Bush will be laughed off as “extremist”. It will be from an Auto industry worker, now unemployed, who lost all of his savings, had his house re-possessed, lost a child in uniform in the Middle East, and cannot afford to send his other child to College. Oh, his wife died waiting for a Doctor, too.
Have a great 2009, and let’s check our work in December – please remind me, I’ll be busy with preparations for my Birthday.
I tend to be a “glass half-full” person, but even I agree with many of your predictions. Especially the Madoff one – I think there are HUGE schemes waiting to be uncovered out there – and I think that a lot of them will involve corporate entities. Let’s toast to surviving 2009 – and Happy Birthday!
Thanks – and the same to you for this year. It’s not a down economy, it’s a ‘different’ economy!