What are you doing New Year's Eve?

Do we "Invent the future that we want to face?"

I think New Year's Eve is a great time to look back and look forward, while we sit on the imaginary tipping point of time. This year, we even have an extra second of time to do that! This blog has been a very personal journey for me, and some of you have contributed some nice comments from time-to-time. What I'd like to do is to encourage you to speculate here about the future, or ruminate about the past. Maybe a year from now it would be interesting to look back at this.

The world that revolves directly around me
This last year has been one of the hardest in my life. Going back to school, where only one professor has been older than me, has been definitely a challenge. I can't pull all-nighter's like I could when I was younger, and the ideal of modern education seems to be some sort of all-in-one superhuman, who writes pulitzer-prize-winning lesson plans every day, connects meaningfully with about a dozen different types of students, and still has time left over to grade papers, get professional development, and still have some sort of life. Not very possible. I have basically had to settle for some sort of 'enforced mediocrity' that gets me by. I want to do better, and have to hope it will get easier with time. Which brings me to the present.

The SFSU semester has ended, but my key science-teaching class is incomplete, and I have a few papers hanging over my head. I return to teach my high school science classes on Tuesday, wrapping up their semester in a few weeks.

How does 2006 look from my selfish point-of-view? Provided I can survive student teaching this next semester, finish my SFSU classes, get my CPR certificate, pay the filing fees, etc., I would hope to be a full-time science teacher somewhere in the Fall.

Zooming out to the macro
We all exist in so many orbits, so I'm just going to zoom out to the big picture politically, and what I see in 2006. We have witnessed an ongoing coup these last few years, that most people still won't admit to themselves the extent to which we have been conquered, as if by aliens in some corny science fiction movie, or more like the Bizarro World out of Superman Comics. When I was growing up, the Jetsons promised us a world where humans would live in leisure, since robots would be doing so much work for us. This dream of a utopia has been turned upside down, and anyone who thinks this way is a discredited commie-pinko. Unless you're some kind of trust funder, anyone who expects to exist without working is some kind of welfare slacker, or worse, a Trekkie. Our public schools are under attack, Social Security is under threat of being pillaged, and our way of life depends on slave labor and undocumented alien labor. The people who are running our government, under ordinary scrutiny, would be in prison for treason, but instead are being handed medals. This all brings me to what I think the big, big story of 2006 will (or should) be.

The Congressional elections of 2006 could be an historic turning point in history. I hold out hope that people will see the Emporer hath no clothes, and give Congress back to the Democrats, who will stanch the bleeding, and, dare I hope this much, initiate impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush. But the forces of control will not give up without a fight, and will do their best to keep the web spun that distracts us all. Either way, I expect a major struggle. America is supposed to be about the positive aspects of pluralism, the defense of minority rights, and these are exactly the things the new American Taliban are attacking.

Fasten your seatbelts, 2006 is going to be a bumpy ride!

Please, consider sharing your predictions below.