HAPPY NEW FEAR!

Stand back, you may get trampled by people rushing out of this year as fast as they can unmindful that the media have been busy preparing platters of new fears for us in 2011.  Here.  Have some:

• How about $5.00 a gallon gas? We would all buy “green cars” but we’re out of work and the Chinese have stopped letting other countries  have the rare earth metals to make the batteries for them.  Trapped!
• How about food prices making us all eat less? The Chinese are hungry. They’ve bought farms in Australia and Africa.  They won’t share.
• How about more terror attacks on our soil?  Al Qaeda in Yemen will be passe.  Like branch libraries they will set them up here where they will do the most good.  How about al Qaeda in Brooklyn? Not as exotic an assignment for the brotherhood and a lot colder.

As the TV heralds the arrival of the New Year in Europe, there is no sign there of anyone waiting for a ball to drop.  People are walking freely in the Kremlin (made beautiful this night by a curtain of snow falling like a scrim in front of the ancient onion domes).

But in New York? No such milling about.  Think about it:  Children today will be raised seeing Times Square on New Year’s Eve  looking like a concentration camp with quadrants of people more or less “penned in.”  They will hear all of the extreme preparations  Where is the party in all of this?   This is not fun. It’s like going to a bull fight and wondering if  the bull will gore the toreador this time around.

All of this makes one think twice about using a johnny-on-the-spot in Times Square. Have they been secured? Who would want to meet their “end” in a rigged  johnny-on-the-spot?  But best not to discuss lest some distressed soul of a murderous bent may be inspired to rig a home toilet and blame it on the terrorists.  Yes, when the mother-in-law is blown sky high, there might be shouts of  “She got  hers in the end, ho, ho, ho.”

Most of this “attitude” comes from one who grew up in a family who hated a New Year’s Eve that focused on paper hats, loud horns and champagne.  It was a family time to gather around once more before the end of the holidays and the push into winter.  There was good food,  perhaps some good friends and definitely a good movie.

Here’s hoping all of my good internet friends are enjoying a free and fine New Year’s Eve and expecting a happy new year. Let’s outsmart the media, shall we?  And now for a movie….  Multitasking at New Year’s as at any other time, alas.