Happy New Year

HAPPY NEW YEAR We’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Personally 2010 was not special, but for all of us I can say this: It was not a perfect year but with nearly Seven billion people all wanting to feel special It was reasonably successful. Awesome in fact. Nature held back her furious destructive capability Enormous killer-quakes were limited to Haiti. Only 280 000 people died. It could have been worse. No memorable hurricanes or mega-tsunamis, And Iceland’s volcano only delayed a few aircraft - And an oil spill in the Gulf, like all such spills, Seems to have had little lasting effect, Despite the nightly tv news fiction. 20 million didn’t die of Hong Kong flu, or bird flu, Or AIDS, or Legionnaires disease or any Of a number of flash-in-the-pan scary diseases Widely hyped in the media. A milliion didn’t die from napalm attacks; And there were no genocidal pogroms based on “Understandable and entirely logical” issues such as Skin color, language choice, or name of God, (It is obviously good to kill someone for being different to ourselves.) And as far as we know no babies were born into slavery, Though 100 million Chinese worked like slaves To produce our glitter for Xmas trees. And the really heart-warming news is that only 4 million children died of malnutrition this year, Down from last year’s total of 5 million. We’ve got a lot to be thankful for.